Brief
Insect remains in a Gran Canaria cave point to food storage before burial use
Archaeologists report that insect remains from a 7th to 9th century funerary cave on Gran Canaria indicate the site was used to store food before it became a burial place. The evidence available to this desk is brief: it names no insect species, no sample size and no method detail.
The work concerns the funerary cave of Cruz de la Esquina on Gran Canaria. Archaeologists analyzed insect remains preserved there and concluded the cave had a life before it held the dead.
According to the source, the cave was used by the island's Indigenous people for food storage, and only later was it adapted into a burial site. The remains are dated to the 7th to 9th centuries AD.
The findings have been published in the journal Antiquity. What the insects were, how many were identified, and how the researchers tied them to stored food rather than to some other use of the cave are not set out in the material we have. Read the finding as a proposed sequence of use at one site, not as a general account of burial practice across the islands.
Our reading
For readers who follow archaeology, this is interesting because it treats insects as evidence of how a space was used, not just as decay. It shifts one cave from a single-purpose burial site to a place with a history, which is a small but concrete correction to how such sites are often described. Anyone tracking Indigenous Canarian history should care, but the claim rests on one site and on detai…
What to do or watch
Watch for the Antiquity paper itself to see which insect species were identified, how the food-storage use was distinguished from the burial use, and whether other caves on the island show the same sequence. Until that is available, the order of use at Cruz de la Esquina remains a single-site claim.
Source details and supporting facts
Each line is stated by the page named above it.
Stated by phys.org
- Archaeologists have analyzed insect remains preserved in the 7th to 9th centuries AD funerary cave of Cruz de la Esquina, Gran Canaria.
- The cave was used by the island's Indigenous people for food storage before being adapted into a burial site.
- The findings have been published in the journal Antiquity.
Sources
- Phys.orgText stored 17 September 2026
How this story was checked. Written from the 1 page listed above, stored 17 September 2026; claims checked against that stored text on 17 September 2026.
What that means
- 3 of 3 reported statements were confirmed against the page that carries them; the rest were removed rather than published.
- Figures in the text were required to appear in the stored source text: yes. Identifiers: yes.
- The check reads stored text only: no claim rests on a fresh look that did not happen.
- Where the reporting was silent, the text says so instead of filling the gap.