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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.
"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.
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.
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."
One of the reasons America gets the lion's share of the blame is because we took so long to actually abolish it.
The USA abolished slavery well ahead of most of the rest of the world. Saudi Arabia, for example, only abolished slavery (officially) in the 1960s.
Actually, the main reason America gets blamed so much for slavery, is that it serves current political agendas to do so. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton call for slavery reparations from the US government, but have never lifted a finger to free a single living slave today, in the Sudan, or any of the other places where slavery continues.
Likewise, they don't call for any of the Africans whose ancestors participated in slave-catching raids to pay those people whose ancestors were herded onto slave ships or marched across the continent to be sold in Arab lands. Nor do they demand reparations to Europe for the million or so Europeans who were captured by slave traders, and sold in North Africa and the middle east.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
This post may seem a little off-topic, but so does its parent, and I feel the insert a few hard facts.
I have worked as an archaeologist in the Desert Southwest and southern Mexico for eight years and I am aware of no firm evidence whatsoever for Aztecs encroaching directly into the traditional lands of the Navajo. There is some evidence that people living at the site of Paquime traded copper and exotic birds with groups from Mesoamerica, but these folks probably lived on or near the Pacific Coast, in what are now the states of Sinaloa and Nayarit. A chronology of Navajo settlement in the Southwest mentions the Aztec, but under a separate timeline. Finally, a curriculum guide from a comparative civilizations class designed to be taught in Navajo schools makes no mention of these alleged Aztec slavers.
From all I have read (and I apologize for not having time to re-create the bibliography here), there were forms of slavery among many Native American groups in North America, including the Aztecs. However, slavery, as conceived by Native Americans, was very different from that imposed by Europeans. Most of the time, war captives were involved. In some cases, as was observed among the 18th century Creek of present-day Georgia, slaves ended up being treated more as outcasts than outright slaves. Some were even adopted into the families of the men who captured them. A similar observation was made regarding indigenous Afreican slavery.
As for celestial observation towers, etc., yes, they were everywhere, among many cultures. But again turning to archaeological evidence, it seems that most were developed indepently by different groups for different purposes.
While there is nothing wrong with being impressed by the accomplishments of Native Americans prior to European colonization for their own sake, don't make the mistake of superimposing models of European civilizational development on these societies. Prehistoric native groups in North America followed very different paths and we owe it to their descendents to appreciate their history on its own terms. We sell everyone short if we have to impose false parallels with European history in order to be impressed.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool. -Richard Feynman
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.
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).
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