Spanish Island of Minorca Fights to Save Archeological Treasure Trove

Time, neglect and human pillaging threaten to rob this rocky Mediterranean island of its ancient legacy.

Minorca, smaller and less visited than its sister Balearic island of Majorca off the east coast of Spain, has 68,347 inhabitants and 2,790 archeological monuments--one for every 25 people. But even as researchers find more monuments, the excavated ones crumble.

To protect what remains of their archeological heritage and to promote reputable research and excavation, Minorcans have launched a drive to have their ruins designated a United Nations World Heritage site.

Most of the island’s distinctive monuments are 2,000 to 4,000 years old. They belong to the Talayotic culture, named after the tall, conical stone watchtowers-- talayots --that were built before contact with Phoenician, Greek and Roman civilizations started the decline of the Talayotic period.

From the earliest period of Minorca’s prehistory, about 2000 BC to 1500 BC, “what’s most characteristic are megalithic grave sites, cavelike chambers in which they buried their dead. We know less about where they lived,” said Joan de Nicolas, a Minorcan journalist and high school teacher whose avocation and passion is Minorca’s archeology.

The most striking monuments are the taulas , imposing T-shaped structures composed of two huge slabs of rock. Usually located within a semicircle of other vertical rock slabs, they are believed to have had religious significance.

“But what religion?” De Nicolas asked. “Who were the gods? We can’t say these people were monotheists. They could have had an agrarian cult or a cult that was related to the stars.”

Another expert on the ruins, Oxford University archeologist William Waldren, suggested that the large number of taulas on the flat island might have had something to do with astrology.

In addition to the 274 talayots that have been identified on Minorca, the monuments include hundreds of artificial and natural caves used as burial grounds, and the remains of houses, religious sites, water systems and two-level oblong communal burial structures known as navetas.

Some of the burial chambers have yielded numerous grave goods such as tools and jewelry. At one prehistoric settlement, researchers found a figure of Imhotep, the Egyptian god of medicine. Why or how it came to be there is unknown.

In 1896, Minorcan archeologist Francesc Camps i Mercadal published a list of what he called intrinsic and extrinsic enemies of the island’s talayots .

Age was the leading intrinsic enemy. Extrinsic enemies included vandalism, war, treasure hunters, vegetation and “the laziness of landowners and tenant farmers, the aphasia and dumbness of academic institutions, the deafness of governments.”

Today’s enemies bear a striking resemblance to those of 100 years ago. De Nicolas cited “the rapid deterioration of important sites excavated in the last 20 years and abandonment of those sites to uncontrolled vegetation.”

He also spoke of new enemies: scuba divers with metal detectors, contemporary cave dwellers and “developers with little sensitivity” to the importance of the island’s history.

De Nicolas said that in at least two major cave burial sites, 20 to 30 years ago “people took lots of items away, and now three meters of sediment are completely scrambled up.” Underwater vandals destroyed the remains of about 15 Roman and Phoenician boats along the coast north and south of the port of Mahon, Minorca’s capital, he said.

De Nicolas was hired by the island’s government to prepare the dossier required before an area can be designated as a World Heritage site.

It won’t happen soon. To have the Minorca ruins added to the list, Spain must persuade an international committee that the monuments meet criteria that make them of “exceptional and universal value.” The earliest this could happen would be December, 1994.

The World Heritage list now has 337 sites. Among them are noble achievements such as the Taj Mahal and Stonehenge and natural wonders such as Yellowstone National Park and the Great Barrier Reef.

Often referred to as an “open-air archeological museum,” the Minorcan landscape of gentle hills, ravines and craggy coastal cliffs is peppered with caves and man-made stone structures that are within easy reach and view of tourists, residents--and treasure hunters.

But the public can’t see any of the legally recovered artifacts. Minorca’s museum has been closed for nearly two decades because of a funding shortage.

Although Minorca is the first of the Balearic Islands to complete a census of its monuments, “it never stops amazing me how little we have worked here,” De Nicolas said. “There’s not one prehistoric village that’s completely excavated.”