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Cueva de la Candelaria (Candelaria Cave) is an archaeological site located in the Coahuila State (México). It is a cave that was used as cemetery by nomad visitors. Early site research was made in 1953 and there was a later season in 1954. As a result of these investigations, many materials were recovered and are kept by Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH). Cueva de la Candelaria findings are interesting by the large amount of textiles found on this site. They constitute a source of important information about nomad Aridoamerica cultures. According to the researchers, the tissues style is very similar to baskets fabrication, but lack of stone tools artifacts such as the atlatl makes difficult the identification of Cueva de la Candelaria occupants. State history mentions on a smaller scale to nomadic groups that inhabited this wide southern Aridoamerica region, these groups were generically called Chichimeca, but also have their specific names, such as the coahuiltecos, huachichiles, irritilas and Tobosos. Little is known about them, historical sources hardly speak of their customs, languages or dialects, or traditions, although some vestiges left for posterity are already known. Archaeological evidence displayed in caves show these were used as houses, as well as burial with tools, clothing and gifts have been discovered. Most popular sites are the Cueva de la Candelaria, La Espantosa y La Chuparrosa.〔 The Cueva de la Candelaria occupants used to bury their dead in packages containing not only the body but body ornaments made of natural fibre, leather, shells, and feathers, as well as other pieces of clothing and footwear. Everything is wrapped in a Cotton or cassava woven blanket, and tied with twine. Most of the packages of Cueva de la Candelaria were found incomplete, that were opened perhaps by looters. ==Background== Since the 17th century there are documents with colonial references to the Coahuila mortuary. In 1645, a Jesuit priest residing in Parras de la Fuente, Coahuila, found one day "… a place full of caves... he saw there... a skulls and human bones sepulcher..." (Pérez de Rivas, quoted in Gonzalez Arratia, 1999, p. 19). Toward 1778, priest Juan Agustín de Morfi reproduced the testimony of a Spanish captain in the Sierra del Carmen, north of Coahuila, "... found a very large cave with Indians corpses, wrapped in fine tapetes” (ibid). However, until the 19th century when different people who explored or visited southwest Coahuila, particularly the Comarca Lagunera, made more precise descriptions of several caves in which the ancient pre-Hispanic inhabitants of the region deposited their dead in a flexed position, wrapped in blankets and tethered, resembling a package, hence the current name "mortuary package”. In 1880 English botanist Edward Palmer toured the Comarca Lagunera, where he found some caves with mortuary remains and a number of associated artifacts in wood, feathers, bone, seashells and stone. In June 2006 the book "The exploration of Edward Palmer" was published. To write this book, Leticia Gonzalez Arratia spent a year at the Smithsonian Institution and a few weeks in the Peabody Museum of Harvard University with the goal of gathering further information on Palmer and his findings on the coahuilense desert. In 1838, Juan Nepomuceno Flores reveals that a Sierra Mojada cave contained many corpses with the mentioned features, and in 1848, Mr Jose Ma. Avila talks about his visit to two mortuary caves, one of them located very near the El Coyote ranch near Torreón, Coahuila. Edward Palmer, English empirical botanist employed by the Peabody Museum, in 1880 found, with informers help, four caves located between El Coyote and Monclova. Although it had been looted, some closed mortuary packages were kept in the vicinity of the rancho El Coyote. Finally, the most important registered mortuary Cave of arid northern Mexico was explored professionally during the 20th century. It was Cueva de la Candelaria, located in the Valle de las Delicias, at the northern border of the Comarca Lagunera. It was explored in 1958 by a team of archaeologists, geologists and physical anthropologists, and their results are summarized in the work of Luis Aveleyra Arroyo de Anda, Irmgard W. Johnson, Pablo Martínez del Río and Arturo Romano. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Candelaria Cave」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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