Footpaths Marked by Changes in Geological Clasts as Indicators of Mobility in Tenerife, Canary Islands

Matilde Arnay-de-la-Rosa, Carlos García-Ávila, Efraín Marrero-Salas, Constantino Criado-Hernández and Emilio González-Reimers

Environmental Archaeology, 2019, vol. 24, issue 3, 285-293

Abstract: Studies on the mobility of past populations are useful in the interpretation of trade and lifestyle. Preservation of ancient paths is uncommon. In Tenerife, a volcanic island of the Canary Archipelago, ancient paths are still preserved, due to the dry climatic conditions and the presence of extensive lava fields in inhospitable areas of the Island. The Guanches who inhabited this island before the Spanish conquest, those surviving in the highlands after the conquest, and modern goatherders, utilised a still identifiable net of paths to access the central mountains. Clasts in the beds of these paths have suffered variable abrasion, depending on the time during which the path was used and on the number of people and/or animals that have walked on it. We estimated roundness of 1819 clasts collected at different parts of the net of paths crossing different lava fields of known antiquity. Significant differences in roundness of clasts among different parts of the paths allowed an inference about the relative importance of each of the paths constituting the net. Therefore, assessment of roundness of the clasts of the beds of paths may aid in the understanding of the migrations of people.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/14614103.2017.1415120 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:yenvxx:v:24:y:2019:i:3:p:285-293

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/yenv20

DOI: 10.1080/14614103.2017.1415120

Access Statistics for this article

Environmental Archaeology is currently edited by Tim Mighall

More articles in Environmental Archaeology from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().