Slashdot Mirror
Remains of First African Slaves Found
An anonymous reader writes to tell us LiveScience is reporting that Archaeologists may have found the oldest remains of slaves brought from Africa to the New World. From the article: "The African origin of the slaves was determined by studying a chemical in their tooth enamel that reveals plant and rock types of their native land. The chemical enters the body through the food chain as nutrients pass from bedrock through soil and water to plants and animals. It is an indelible signature of birthplace, the researchers said, because it can be directly linked to the bedrock of specific locales."
Because 99% (at least) of immigration from Africa to the New World at the time was slavery. It is possibly they weren't slaves, but not very likely.
The city was founded in 1540 by Spanish conquistadores as San Francisco de Campeche atop the preexisting Maya city of Canpech or Kimpech.
Now we know that the Cortes expedition had some African slaves in it. Here is a question on the subject, while research is done on the many aspects of European Slavery, how much research is done on inter-African slavery or Islamic slavery in regards to Africa? I know we hear a bunch about slavery in the United States, but how about the United Kingdom or French slavery?
Heck, what about trans-tribal slavery in the Americas? While working on a paper about the Cortes expedition there were references in many texts and documents about the Aztecs having slaves, but much more time and space devoted to the few slaves the expedition had with them.
'It is an indelible signature of birthplace, the researchers said, because it can be directly linked to the bedrock of specific locales.'
Unless, of course, you fill your water barrels at that location, and then everyone on board drinks from that 'unique' source for a given period of time, in which case you'd easily detect false-positives and mistakenly believe the entire crew was borne in one location.
Reminds me of when some researchers found WWII supply caches buried in the Sahara by Rommel's forces...the first thing they did was to release a study claiming they could better define modern pollution, as Rommel's water had been carefully sealed, buried and protected. That study I can buy...this one, on slave origins, I'm less inclined, sorry.
Americans have been blamed for slavery yet this first group were obviously brought by the Spanish. A number of Europeon countries were involved in the slave trade. I'm not aware of American ships involved in the slave trade itself. Wealthy landowners in this country were buyers but the trade was actually Europeon in origin. Just find it odd that the US gets all the blame when the slavers were African and Europeon. Kind of like saying the drug addicts were responsible for making, transporting and selling the drugs. Rich Americans back in the 1700s and 1800s were at fault but they were hardly the only ones involved. And an FYI most Americans at the time didn't own slaves or support slavery. Many in fact actively worked against the practice.
"The chemical enters the body through the food chain as nutrients pass from bedrock through soil and water to plants and animals. It is an indelible signature of birthplace, the researchers said, because it can be directly linked to the bedrock of specific locales."
That said, I wonder what the results of the same testing would show on individuals that reside in current industrialized first world nations. It occurs to me that a good portion of the food we eat is produced abroad.
I pity the anthropologists of tommorow.
There's a large body of knowledge on the Islamic slave trade and intra-African trading.
1 01101a.htm
http://africanhistory.about.com/library/weekly/aa
Just about everyone was guilty when it came to the slave trade. Jews, Christians, Muslims, and most everyone in between.
That's just the (unfortunate) way things were
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Did they? My understanding was that Hernán Cortés had the ruling family and other people with power tortured and/or killed. Of the general population, those who didn't die in the violence of the Spanish invasion were forced to flee and probably ended up mixing with other tribes.
And then there was the smallpox epidemic (and other diseases) that the Spanish brought from Europe and for which the native population had no defenses. In fact, Cuitláhuac died of smallpox and his nephew Cuauhtémoc then became the last Aztec emperor. The Spanish captured him, tortured him, kept him prisoner a few years and then hanged him.
But even though the Aztec population was significantly reduced and scattered, their descendants are still around. There's been just a bit of foreign immigration to Mexico the last 484 years, mostly from Spain. Want to guess why modern Mexicans look a bit different than Aztecs and other locals did? : ) And finally, their language (Náhuatl) is still spoken in several states in central Mexico.
Full disclosure: most of my ancestry comes from the Totonacs. This was one of many tribes enslaved by the Aztecs and all too glad to help the Spanish overthrow the evil overlords. Talk about the devil you know, huh?
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
This stuff is fascinating because like every ingorant Joe out there I thought stuff (good and bad) started happening on the North American continent mostly after the Europeans settled. And such things as colonies, slavery and celestial observations would not have existed here before.
White man says white man in strange place = "adventurous explorer"
White man says black man in strange place = "slave"
Um, is this the scientific reasoning?
I know. I know. It's a cheap shot at acadamia. However, I just *had* to say it because the irony of it amuses me. Trust me, I won't be the last to point this out!
What useful invention or discovery can be attributed to any of the huge number of sub-saharan Africans? How many famous black scientists are there? In fact it seems they only become succesful once they translate to a western society (Nelson Mandela, Colyn Powell, Eddy Murphy) (which suggest the problem isn't genetic but instead cultural or environmental).
So I don't think it's at all unreasonable for people to assume a black corpse in North America at that time was probably a slave (or indentured servant) and not an explorer for the simple reason there's no evidence black africans explored.
When the white use of African slaves began, Europe was largely free of any other kind of slavery. There's an image in the collective cultural consciousness of how slavery began. This image seems to be that Europeans showed up and just started whipping the black people into submission from horseback, then taking them off and selling them. It's like Planet of the Apes.
The idea of selling the Africans as slaves wasn't spontaneous. There were already African slave markets. A few scumbag Europeans bought slaves. People noticed how much cheaper it was to have a slave than a servant, and how much more reliable. Their skin became a permanent uniform, so there was no way they could steal property and run off with it. That made them trustworthy, in a sense.
Gradually, the economic benefits made using the African slave market to get labour the only way to stay competitive. Yes, the people involved in the trade were bastards, but the people who didn't participate were economically culled. It's the kind of situation in which only government interference can stop the process. No matter how many high minded individuals refuse to be a part the crime won't stop until there's a law.
Passing a law like that takes time. It takes people fighting and writing great essays and changing the minds of their countrymen one at a time. It isn't good enough to convince the populace that slavery is probably pretty bad. They have to be convinced that it's a crime.
In this way, the atrocities of Europe trading slaves were pretty much unavoidable, just like most of the Native American deaths were unavoidable once smallpox started to spread. Individuals did horrible things, true, but individuals are always doing horrible things. Even now.
As a culture we need to understand that historical forces take time to work. The response to this kind of guilt should be to work ever harder on ending similar situations now, not endless hand-wringing about how unpleasant past atrocities were. Today's atrocities, by sheer number, are ten times worse. They just don't have a united brand name.
The Arab and interneccine slavery of Africans was unjust - but seldom so relentlessly brutal,
Guess again.
When the British were hunting down slave ships in the 1800's, Arab slave traders routinely slit slaves' throats and tossed them overboard if they caught sight of a British flag. Plausible deniability, you know. Also, slaves were often marched across the sahara to sell on the coast of libya, with well over half dying of thirst along the way. Not to mention, the number of men who were castrated, to provide eunuchs for Arab buyers.
Pick up a copy of Thomas Sowell's essay "The real history of slavery", which goes into considerably more detail.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Given the fact that the article referenced is a rense.com link to the people's daily (communist party's mouthpiece) I will take it with suitable scepticism until further info is forthcoming.
A blog about stuff.
Cribbing liberally from "bonecrusher's" post on this topic at metafilter , According to many economists, slave-owning is an example of "rent" "a market distortion that reduces the overall productive capacity of the economy. A functioning labor market should do a better job of directing labor to where it is most productive than guys with whips and dogs." (previous text in quotes is by bonecrusher, who explained it much more concisely than I could).
Basically, when you have oligarchs or slave-owners running things, you may end up with a situation which is better for them, personally, but it hurts the economy overall. In the slave-owning scenario, it hurts the slaves most of all (duh!), but it also wrecks things for what would be the middle class, if the oligarchs weren't hogging everything for themselves. So a few people are better off, but the vast majority are either totally fscked, or partially fscked. So, slave owners totally ruined the South's economy and made it unable to grow well.
Whether or not the US profited by exploiting other people and countries is beyond the scope of this post, which is just about how retarded slavery is from an economic standpoint (to say *nothing* of how retarded it is from a moral, social, or ethical standpoint!).
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
Not all of us do, but think of your example. The vast majority of Americans live in houses or apartments that are 50 years old or less. The vast majority of Universities in the United States are 150 years old or less. The vast majority of towns and cities are less than 200 years old. You'd be hard pressed to find a bar/club more than 100 years old, although in small towns and college towns the building the bar is in may be that old.
My father in law is from Croatia. He went to high school in a castle that was built well over 600 years ago. The farmhouse they lived in was well over 100 years old.
You get a completely different worldview growing up in a "new" area versus growing up in the old world. Not necessarily better or worse, but different.
Not to mention that one of the major growth areas of the US industrial revolution economy was farm implements, which obviously weren't as needed with {slave|sharecropper|serf} labor. Southern agriculture wasn't really modernized until the 1950s.
There is a gerat book called "Lies My Teacher Told Me" (I cannot remember the name of the author) that talks about certain documented facts that are never taught in history classes. One is that Columbus knew that there was a new world to the west. He had been to Iceland a few times, and there were still Norsemen in Greenland (who would visit Canada for timber, etc, and had had dealings with the "natives"). On top of this, Columbus had been to "the Gold Coast" of Africa (aka The Slave Coast aka The Ivory Coast) and had met the representatives of the king of Mauritania, if not the king himself, at the time probably the wealthiest man in the world. They had had a few colonies "a few days to the west" in a new land, but they had abandoned them year before, because the locals kept attacking them. So Columbus knew he was sailing to new lands, not India, because he had data from the Norse and the Mauritanians about western lands over the sea.
Fast forward a decade or three. The Aztecs were found to have carvings of men, some of the carvings having definite African facial features. (The book has pictures of these carvings, and yep, they do, whatever the politically correct police might say.) The Aztecs were also growing cotton that was the same type grown in Egypt. On top of this, when Spaniards first landed in South America, near what is now Venezuala, they were talking to a local chieftain and noticed a bunch of African-descended slaves being led through a coastal village. The Spaniards were surprised at this, and asked where the slaves had come from. The chieftain said that they had raided their village a few generations ago and had enslaved them.
So the first African slaves weren't brought here by the Spaniards. Hell, they may well have been brought here by other Africans (the Mauritanians).
Just putting in my $.05 (inflation, taxes, and all that).
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
Yeah, that's a great rule. "There shall be no displays or placards protesting the policies of the current administration within the House Chamber."
Nazis I tell you ... Nazis!
I don't know if folks are aware of it, but I'd like to point out that slavery is alive and well today in the New World.
Particularly here in Georgia, the deep south and heart of the confederacy.
While Lincoln may have freed the slaves for private ownership, he didn't go far enough. Slavery is still legal by the state, in just every state, in the form of the use of prisoners.
I went to prison for 2 years in 2002 of a 12 year sentence on a crime I didn't commit. Basically someone made an accusation about me, and then hysteria and greed set in, and then the slander game began. It was a witchhunt and I was the witch. I estimate in the end they made about $120,000 off of me in billing the taxpayer; myself losing another $60,000 in lawyer fees and lost wages other damages. I don't know about you, but thats a whole hell of a lot of money in a recession. If I would of served the full 12 years, they would of probably made almost a half a million dollars off of me, billing you the taxpayer $35,000 a year. Let me tell you, I'm about the most harmless guy in the world, I don't bother anybody, and I don't break any laws. The justice system isn't about justice. Its all a scam and a slander game. Its about greed and profit.
For two years I was kept in the most heinous of conditions, and was forced to work for which I received no compensation.
I won my appeal by fighting back. Which was very hard to do, because I was mentally and physically exhausted, being kept in the most inhumane of conditions, lacking of nutrition, and my situation was grossly exacerbated because I was hypoglycemic and yet receiving no treatment whatsoever. A hypoglycemic, if not eating something every 2 hours, suffers and appauling roster of symptoms, the most painful and difficult being being confused all the time, unable to concentrate, unable to focus.
So for those two years, basically, I was a slave.
Since I tested out with a slashdot level IQ and actually hit a bit of precious luck, I was put to work in the library, just like Andy in the movie Shawshank Redemption. For prison and someone smart, it was a good job because you had access to books in a way the general population didn't at all. Let me say it was luck I got this job, most people had nighmarish jobs. Laundry, caffeteria work, swinging a bush ax, etc.
Even though I worked in the library, I fought back. I wrote slogans throughout the books and anarchy symbols on the inside, slamming the system.
When nobody was looking, I wrote slogans from Animal Farm on the prison walls outside. Nobody understood them but me, since the average grade level in prison is about sixth grade (I tested out 13th, the highest the tests go). Prison is a big sensory deprivation chamber. The constant noise, the inhuman conditions, the constant stupidity, the poor food, it will wear your mind down. Prison doesn't do anything but make people stupid and vilent and insane.
Once some 'robocop' as I called him saw my slogans, and wrote them down on his little notepad. I'm sure he took them straight back to the warden. If I would of been caught, I would of surely been beaten to death out of site for defacing state property. I've been out a year now but still I chuckle, I wonder what they made of "Four legs good, two legs bad!". I'm not joking. For real.
I wrote some notes of what I would post to slashdot if I ever got out. I still have them somewhere, they are in a tired and exhausted script that looks a lot to me like chicken scratch now, I was so fading away then. It doesn't matter. My mind is full of things to say now. Totally.
One seredipitious thing did happen. Four doors down from my cell they put an RFDI engineer in. An old guy, in his 50's. I nicknamed him "Marconi".
You can check him out here (punch in 1141126 in the GDC field on the page and NEXT your way through):
http://www.dcor.state.ga.us/GDC/O