# Buried in a Granary: Why Did the People of Gran Canaria Bury Their Dead in an Old Grain Store? *Study Suggests a Pre-Hispanic Burial Cave on Gran Canaria Was Repurposed From an Earlier Grain Store* By Sandee Oster · Published 21 September 2026 Source: https://archaeologyteahouse.com/stories/buried-in-a-granary-why-did-the-people-of-gran-canaria-bury-their-dead-in-an-old-grain-store Primary source: [Buried in the pantry: using archaeoentomology to assess cave reuse at the pre-Hispanic site of Cruz de la Esquina](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/buried-in-the-pantry-using-archaeoentomology-to-assess-cave-reuse-at-the-prehispanic-site-of-cruz-de-la-esquina/6B144AD376A3E8ECFB2959F1DAA60FDC#article) Subjects: [Gran Canaria](https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q178925) --- ![](https://archaeologyteahouse.com/media/01a0b568-e14e-7c18-9b97-222e58e0f7c2/1600.webp) *Model of a Sitophilus granarius, made ​​by Alfred Keller in the year 1935. Credit: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Sitophilus_granarius#/media/File:2013_Naturkundemuseum_sitophilus_granarius_anagoria.JPG)* In an ancient burial cave in Gran Canaria, archaeologists found a bunch of disarticulated human remains in 2001. Much like other burials on the island, it was thought that these bodies might have been exposed to the sun to dry out before being wrapped up and placed in the cave. It wouldn’t be until over 20 years later that an unexpected discovery would be made, one that illuminated how we humans shape the world around us and came to make a once mundane place into place of importance. You see, not only did archaeologists recover bones, but they also recovered the remains of insects, thousands of them. And what they suggest is that before this cave had ever been considered for burial, it was most likely nothing more than an average storage space for grains. But how did a grain storage place become a burial cave, and how did the insects of all things reveal this detail? ### **The Study of Insects** ![](https://archaeologyteahouse.com/media/01a0b55c-e3e1-7e4c-9f9b-725733b4588b/960.webp) *Various insects identified at Cruz de la Esquina. Credit: Henríquez-Valido et al. 2026* Insects: for some people they are nothing more than creepy crawlies, but for some archaeologists, they are a valuable window into the past. These special individuals are known as archaeoentomologists. But why study insects? Insects can tell you a lot about an environment: what season something was buried, whether things were exposed on the surface or buried immediately after death, whether remains were moved, and whether plant or meat materials were nearby. We know these things mainly from forensic entomology (this may or may not creep you out), which is partly when scientists leave modern corpses in fields and other places to see which insects like to feed on human flesh, bones, and clothes, what they do to the bodies and what traces remain. But there is a problem with insects: they rarely survive; their fragile exoskeletons break, get swept away or are simply ignored by excavators, both past and present. In fact, in North Africa, with Egypt being the major exception, insects are rarely collected systematically during excavation. Even I have sorted through excavated material, looking for tiny little insects from legs to heads to wings, even though we don't have an archaeoentomologist in our department and, off the top of my head, I couldn't even point to one in all of South Africa. Yet collect the little buggers we do regardless, because we know just how powerful a natural archaeological tool they can be. In the Canary Islands, the study of insects has only recently begun to take hold. ### **Canary Island Burials** ![](https://archaeologyteahouse.com/media/01a0b55e-2533-7e14-babf-5b721820af4e/960.webp) *A survey map of the burial cave, showing its layout from above and side-on, the remains, and where the sediment samples were taken. Credit: Henríquez-Valido et al. 2026* The Canary Islands are dotted with burial caves that belong to the Indigenous people who called the islands home before the Spanish conquest in the 15th century. Burials are amazing windows into a culture’s beliefs, practices, and views on the dead. However, after the conquest, much was destroyed, leaving us with little knowledge about the Indigenous customs and culture, particularly their burial practices. Based on historical accounts and some insect materials held in museums (albeit without any context as to where they came from exactly), it has been proposed but not proven that bodies of the dead were exposed to the sun before being left in the caves wrapped in textiles. Archaeoentomology is one way to test that theory and see whether these practices A) did occur, and B) when they occurred. But to test a claim, you first need some bodies and a site, and that’s where the Cruz de la Esquina funerary cave at Acusa Seca, Gran Canaria (c. seventh–ninth centuries AD) comes in. Located within the steep escarpments of the Acusa plateau are various artificial caves, aka caves carved by humans, used as homes, storage spaces and burial caves, in a complex that appears to have been occupied since at least the 5th century AD. Cruz de la Esquina consists of around 20 caves, spread across several levels with distinct functions, with domestic dwellings along the base and storage areas above. Only one cave was used for burial; it consisted of two chambers and was identified during surveys in 2001. Scattered within were various parts of different skeletons, while the main chamber contained a wooden platform for the bodies and desiccated rope, rush fabric and leather. And of course, the main star of this study: thousands upon thousands of insect remains. ### **Looking at the Creepy Crawlies** ![](https://archaeologyteahouse.com/media/01a0b56e-5e73-7f56-b2ed-0147f800f5ef/960.webp) *Dermaptera (earwig) one of the may insects identified by the researchers. Credit: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Dermaptera#/media/File:Dermaptera_7721.jpg)* The team took 43 one-litre sediment samples from the top and bottom layers, from under planks, at the edges, and in the middle. Every single one of these was run through a column of very fine sieves, just 0.25 to 10mm. Then the slow and tedious, but fruitful, work began. The coarse fractions were picked over by eye under a lighted magnifier with fine tweezers; the fine fractions went under a stereomicroscope at up to 80×. The insect remains were then compared to known reference collections. All in all, the researchers recovered 8173 arthropod remains and were able to identify 8082 of them. That is crazy! But what exactly did they tell the researchers? As you may have expected, among the first insects to get to the corpses were flies. Throughout Cruz de la Esquina, fly remains are dominant. Among them were blowflies (*Calliphoridae*) and flesh flies (*Sarcophagidae*), which are usually the first to arrive just as decomposition sets in; in total, they make up nearly half of the specimens identified. Next were the scuttle flies (*Phoridae*); they too arrive early in decomposition but typically only when bodies are indoors or underground. Mid-stage arrivals included houseflies, which tend to turn up once active decomposition is under way, and later still, flies of the Fanniidae family. Then the beetles moved in; among them, *Dermestes maculatus *was the most common carrion beetle, which eats dried muscle tissue and fly larvae, before the remains were finally polished off by the red-legged ham beetle, *Necrobia rufipes*, which turns up at the dry and skeletonisation stages. The different insects tell a story the bones themselves could not. Just as elsewhere on the island, bodies seem to have been tightly wrapped in plant fibres and hide, then placed almost immediately into the cave, where they decomposed in situ (aka they were not moved from one cave to another, nor were they moved from outside to indoors). According to the study, this means they were never exposed to the sun to dry out a little first, which challenges the earlier burial hypothesis. These flies and beetles were not the only insects the researchers found; among them was an unexpectedly large number of storage pests. ### **Buried in a Pantry** ![](https://archaeologyteahouse.com/media/01a0b572-c0f1-7990-a5c2-e4b13625c5fd/960.webp) *Cenobio de Valerón, caves in Gran Canaria, look for the pigeon for scale reference. Credit: [Wikimedia Commons](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Cenobio_de_Valer%C3%B3n%2C_May_2018.jpg?utm_source=en.wikipedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=original)* Around 21% of identified insects came from species typically associated with granaries, including granary weevils (*Sitophilus granarius*), *Mezium americanum, Stegobium paniceum, Oryzaephilus surinamensis, Tenebroides mauritanicus/latens* and *Cryptophagus cf. dentatus*. Granary weevils are flightless; to have gotten into the burial cave, someone had to have brought them in, while the sheer number and diversity of the other pests suggest they weren’t the result of occasional food offerings. Sure, a few pieces of grain and other plant offerings may have produced a handful of these insects. But the staggering number suggests that the cave was probably a granary. More specifically, it was perhaps a granary before it was converted into a burial cave. Why use a granary as a burial cave? Maybe it was a granary, then hundreds of years later it became a burial space? Probably not: a radiocarbon date from one of the weevils places it at AD 772–974, meaning it and possibly many of its crawling little friends were still living in and around the newly built burial platform when the cave was first converted to a burial space. The date may also provide the answer to the sudden shift in function. By around the eighth and ninth centuries, storage was apparently shifting from small and simple granaries, the type this cave seems to resemble, to larger interconnected structures. The authors thus weigh the alternatives. Number one: the burials were accompanied by cereal offerings and cereal straw placed in the wrappings and on the platform. But neither is attested in any funerary context on the island, which makes this look unlikely, and the sheer number of insects would mean the offering of grain had to have been equally enormous. The other hypothesis: the cave was a granary, but when the newer, larger granaries opened up, one of them apparently just 20m away, whatever cereals were stored there were moved out, opening up a massive unused chamber perfect for burials. And if that is what happened, then the humble granary weevil, too flightless to leave and too well fed to care, may have become the smoking gun, linking the change from granary to burial space. --- Insects can provide a lot more information than people may think. The disarticulated bunch of human remains would have certainly given some insights on their own, but only through the study of the insects alongside them could researchers argue that these bodies were never exposed to any sun, at least not for any significant amount of time. And they suggested to the researchers that the chamber was not always a burial space; it perhaps started out with a far more mundane purpose: a storage space for cereals. We sometimes think of things as always having been some way, but meanings can change. A burial mound built to honour the dead can become a fort because it provides a good overview of the landscape; an ancient wall can be dismantled to build a sheep pen because, hey, the stones are already here anyway. Or a storage granary can be converted into a burial space, because somewhere else there was a better place to store the grains. Humans adapt to change, and they assign meaning. Understanding how and why things changed in the first place can give us insights into what a culture valued and what drove them to that point. For the Canary Islands, where so much history prior to the 15th century is lost, these small clues can provide a lot of insight. Would you be comfortable burying someone in a space that used to be a pantry, or does that sit oddly with you? And importantly for me, would you have the patience to sit at a microscope picking beetle heads out of cave dirt, or is that a special kind of madness only we archaeologists understand? *Let me know what you think, and if you'd like to support this blog and the person writing it, you can *[*chip in once, monthly, or yearly.*](https://archaeologyteahouse.com/support)* Only if you'd like to.* ### Reference Henríquez-Valido P, Huchet J-B, Morales J, Rodríguez-Rodríguez A. Buried in the pantry: using archaeoentomology to assess cave reuse at the pre-Hispanic site of Cruz de la Esquina. *Antiquity*. Published online 2026:1-18. doi:10.15184/aqy.2026.10407 ## Common questions **Did the pests disappear once the burials started?** Nope, they kept breeding in the cave after the bodies arrived, most likely feeding on cereal residue left on the floor beneath the new platform. **Why did the insects survive at all?** They were preserved by desiccation, thanks to the cave's stable, dry conditions.