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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."
How do they know they were slaves?
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.
That's odd.
I always assumed the first African Slaves were in Africa.
But, maybe that's because they were.
Sounds like a flaw, except that this tooth enamel is deposited early in childhood. Especially in the early days of the slave trade, children were a rarity to export since you could get much more value per space from a fully grown person.
There is a record of an African slave in Hispaniola as early as 1502, brought by the Sevillian trader Juan de Córdoba.
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'd say that "I, for one, welcome our new slave-trading overlords.", but it would be in poor taste.
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
What is it with Americans?
The house I live in is 200 years old. The school I went to was over 400. And the pub at the end of our road is nearly 700 years old.
Why do you think a lifetime is a long time? Most mature cultures go back thousands of years. Incidentally, though many people would quote the Mansfield ruling of 1779 as marking a legal end of slavery in England, this actually marked a legal rejection of the condition of slavery, a statement that foreigners could not expect to enforce this state in England.
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. 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.
Individual English and European businessmen were still free to run enterprises in other countries where the slave laws were different. But the reason why the US is considered so culpable on this question is that it maintained a hypocritical stance of freedom from commercial taxes but slavery for people, which the rest of the Anglo-Saxon community had rejected about 800 years earlier.