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."
But possibly not the first.
Uncensored Google results requested and delivered by email
How do they know they were slaves?
The remains, in a colonial era graveyard in one of the oldest European cities in Mexico, date between the late-16th century and the mid-17th century, not long after Columbus first set foot in the Americas.
100 years is "not long after"? Has the length of the year changed since then or what?
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That's odd.
I always assumed the first African Slaves were in Africa.
But, maybe that's because they were.
"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!
I'm happy to see any science-related stories on slashdot - if you're not interested, don't read it.
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.
I actually agree with you, partly. Although I am happy to see more science-related issues on Slashdot, comments like yours prove that clearly some nerds here are not intelligent enough to handle them.
It took the "middle passage" and other horrors to really turn large-scale African slavery into the worst atrocity of the past two-thousand years.
Stalin? The Nazis and Khmer Rouge? Small potatoes to these horrors, which continued for almost two-hundred years. The Arab and interneccine slavery of Africans was unjust - but seldom so relentlessly brutal, with human beings reduced to a level of treatment beneath that of animals.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
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.
There are many kinds of nerds ok? This is interesting to our anthropological nerd brethren. Nerds need to learn to respect each other.
No Sigs!
Check out http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm.
While I agree that the slave trade was bad, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao far outstrip it.
That page is kinda freaky.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
So, it looks like someone has been sitting on this story until black history month started. Looks like /. got it posted 27 minutes into it.
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.
This guy had a website in 1502? That's pretty advanced, at least for a slave.
All true, but the fact remains that the indigenous American civilizations went into a sharp (relatively speaking) decline 100-200 years before the Spanish got there. The area was significantly depopulated by Cortes' time; I believe there are several examples of cities whose population size wouldn't be matched again until early 19th century, being virtually deserted, long before any invaders looking for a "New World".
As far as I know, the reasons for this are still unknown - doesn't necessarily make it "mysterious", we just don't have the info.
sic transit gloria mundi
They know because they found the words "First slave!" etched into their tooth enamel.
Thanks, I know everyone was involved but even in Middle Eastern Studies when it comes to Islamic Slave Trade the most you see or hear is, "they had slaves" or "and these people are decended from slaves". And if pressed a professor or speaker will say, "Yes but the United States was worse."
When it's American History slavery gets alot of attention, when it's the Middle East it's brushed aside.
And, slavery is called for in the Bible and Koran
Sura 2 Verse 178
2.178: O you who believe! retaliation is prescribed for you in the matter of the slain, the free for the free, and the slave for the slave, and the female for the female, but if any remission is made to any one by his (aggrieved) brother, then prosecution (for the bloodwit) should be made according to usage, and payment should be made to him in a good manner; this is an alleviation from your Lord and a mercy; so whoever exceeds the limit after this he shall have a painful chastisement."
"Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids" (Leviticus 25:44)
"Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession. And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen for ever" (Leviticus 25:44-46)
Yea, I got two quotes from the Bible, I'm not as up on my Koran as I am on my Old Testament.
Actually, you're mistaken. There were many slave ships which were built, owned and operated by yankees. Britain outlawed the slave trade before the United States, or any other European countries did, and for a period of about two decades or so, all the slave ships were American, Dutch, French or Spanish.
Incidentally, the first American state to prohibit the importation of slaves was Virginia. The Boston shipowners had a fit over that.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I'm a military historian working on my Masters and one of my areas of study is the American West 1865-1890 and from that I've looked alot at the Cortes Expedition, in fact I just spent a term working on a paper comparing and contrasting the militaries of the Aztecs to the Spanish.
The Expedition did kill alot of nobles and military leaders, once in a, maybe, unprovoked attack on the Temple of the Moon during a High Holy day and then alot of others were killed during the following responses at the Palace of Axayactl, Cortes's relief and escape and the Battle of Otumba in 1520 and then in the fighting of 1521.
Since the leadership of the Aztecs and other nations in the region lead from the front so to speak, the decapitation of the ruling families and thier destruction largely came about on the field of battle in 1520 and 1521. The sack of Tenochtitlán in 1521 really was the only time there was torturing and murder by the Spanish and thier allies in the conflict. Most of the Aztec, Tepeacan and other allied leaders were lost in the field before the illnesses and murders during the sack.
Recall that during the period following the retreat of the Spanish and Tlaxcalan from Tenochtitlán envoys from the Aztecs tried to pull the Tlaxcalan leaders into an alliance, however the severity of the Aztec relations with their neighbors trumped the Aztec called for unity in the face of invasion by outsiders even though the Tlaxcalan and Aztecs shared ancestry and gods. The Aztecs apparently treated others in the region so poorly that the Tlaxcalans would not come to thier aid even though they had a history togeather.
And the "puritans" were not, by and large, escaping religious persecution - anymore than the Taliban are, by fleeing into Pakistan. These were a nasty, repressive rapacious and intolerant lot of religious manics - who stoned women and children to death, for immodesty in dress. That included the wearing of colors.
Look into teh English Civil war, and the Parliamentary terror of England that was birthed in the midlands. Mullah Omar should have had such a run.
These people were ejected for their inability to live withtheir neighbors, or fled accountability after the return of the Monarchy.
This is a gross simplification - but roughly the shape of things. They were egalitarian enough - were you a member of their class, race and creed.
Funny, so few Americans are actually descended from these people that, as children, they are trained to regard as their forebears. Most of the blacks in America can claim a longer association with the country's history than most whites or asians.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
So why is the American (and British) system currently so geared to benefiting oligarchs and making things using cheap labor? Why are our education systems increasingly failing? Is it because our leaders are becoming like the backwards oligarchs of the South, interested solely in lining their own pockets to the detriment of our long term prospects?
What makes this especially interesting is the rise in prominence of people like McKain in the US and now Cameron in the UK, who are emphasising traditional middle class values against the corporatism of the respective governments. Time for an educated middle class backlash, perhaps.
Pining for the fjords
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
But they sure did get a boost in business when Europeans joined the trade!
I'm in a Unix state of mind.
What useful invention or discovery can be attributed to any of the huge number of sub-saharan Africans?
Didn't one of the Bantu empires make steel before the Europeans?
But yes, there's a lot of good stuff about the influence of environment on the society that arises there; check out Guns, Germs, and Steel if you haven't already.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Most mature cultures go back thousands of years.
In intelligible form? Sorry, but no European culture goes back "thousands of years". If you go back two thousand, you're at the dawn of Christianity, which bore only a passing resemblance to today's versions. The Romans had switched over to imperial rule. While I can understand how Western culture takes a lot from Romans and Greeks, to imply that we're all part of the same culture is plainly bullshit--we don't do human sacrifice, giant statues of our gods in the town square, gladiator fights, Legions forbidden from coming home, or the divine right of kings. Or humping little boys.
You'd have as much luck fitting into Roman society as you would into a Bantu empire of the same period. Living in Europe may mean you live near some old buildings, but it doesn't mean you live in the same culture that built them.
If you are considering when slavery ceased to be an accepted part of life in the countries which later became the UK, this would have been in the early Middle Ages, around 1100 (not long after the Romans left and the Danes settled, around 800. The Vikings would have been the last group living in England who accepted slavery as a normal condition.
No, those are the dates when enslaving white people became unacceptable. The British were quite involved with African slavery from 1562 until 1803, when they started discouraging it, and 1833, when it was actually abolished by the Brits.
Habeas Corpus, though codified in the Magna Carta (1215), was part of the common law well before this date, and indicates that freedom is the presumed state for any individual who has not been found guilty of a crime. While slavery was formally abolished in the US around 1865, the acceptance of slavery seems to have persisted in the southern states until around 1960.
It's disingenuous for you to compare the time when Brits stopped enslaving fellow whites to the time when Americans ended legal discrimination against blacks.
And also, what persisted in the South until the Civil Rights era wasn't slavery so much as it was Jim Crow--segregation, much like the Apartheid that South Africa had until relatively recently. Racist, certainly--but comparing it to the end of whites-as-slaves in Viking culture? Give me a break.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
And the Southern Democrats were the slave owners. Oh, and the abolitionists like John Brown? They were like the Religious Right. Read some history, moron.
My point is that "man is a bad animal" wherever and whenever he is. We'll kill our own kind, crap where we eat, and take more than we need and then use our wonderful rational mind to justify it all.
First of all, one must understand that slaves are capital, not labour.
The difficulty with this assertion is that human beings cannot be owned, and therefore cannot be property and therefore cannot be capital. This is true regardless of what the law says. The law can say pi is equal to three. But that does not make it so.
I will grant you that slaves can serve in the economic role of capital, just as 3 can serve in the mathematical role of pi. But economies (and circles) built on the basis of such falsehoods will be grossly distorted, and for much the same reaasons.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
You do realise that Strom Thurmond was a Democrat when he ran on a segregationist platform? That Republicans were the ones behind civil rights in the 50s/60s? And that "segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever" was said by Alabama Gov. George Wallace a Democrat?
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
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
"The difficulty with this assertion is that human beings cannot be owned, and therefore cannot be property and therefore cannot be capital"
Might I remind you that a person CAN be owned -- if they believe (or are forced to think) they are owned.
Reminds me of Eddie Murphy in one of his standup routines:
"I am sure the first slaves got off the boat and said, 'bail that hay?'. Fuck you masta. You bail the hay. And then about 20 MF's with whips showed up and the rest of the slaves said 'nevermind, we'll bail the shit'".
Intentions are great until you are facing down the barrel of a gun. Then, for some reason (obvious), most men don't take such a pricipled stand.
Remains of First African Slaves Found Don't they mean the first African slaves in America. It's not like there was no slavery in Africa before Columbus found America.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.