Plantation Slavery Originated On São Tomé, According To Archaeologists

[ramonmercado]

Was this the first slave plantation?​

Plantation slavery was invented on this tiny African island, according to archaeologists​

By Kristina Killgrove published 2 days ago

A 16th-century sugar estate on the tiny African island of São Tomé is the earliest known example of plantation slavery.

The island of São Tomé, located in the Gulf of Guinea off the western coast of Africa, served as a major point of connection in the 16th-century European-African slave trade. Here, we see the inside of a building at Praia Melão that researchers excavated. (Image credit: M. Dores Cruz)

Plantation slavery may have originated on a tiny west African island at the equator, according to archaeologists who investigated a 16th-century sugar mill and estate.

São Tomé (Portuguese for "Saint Thomas"), an island 150 miles (240 kilometers) west of Gabon in the Gulf of Guinea, was first settled by the Portuguese in the late 15th century. Finding an uninhabited island with abundant wood, fresh water and the potential for growing sugarcane, the Portuguese monarchy tried to entice people to move there. Due to high rates of malaria, though, São Tomé was thought of as a death trap. By 1495, to supply labor for the sugar trade, the Portuguese rulers forced convicts, Jewish children and enslaved Africans to move to the island.

While other Portuguese sugar mills relied on enslaved people solely for manual labor, in the São Tomé sugar plantation system, enslaved people — largely from what are now Benin, the Republic of the Congo, Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo — performed nearly all the tasks, from the harvesting and processing of sugarcane to the carpentry and stone masonry needed to build and run the mills.

Due to lack of research, the historical significance of the island has been mostly overlooked.

This made São Tomé "the first plantation economy in the tropics based on sugar monoculture and slave labour, a model exported to the New World where it developed and expanded," the researchers wrote in a new study, published Monday (Aug. 14) in the journal Antiquity.

Source:
https://www.livescience.com/archaeo...ny-african-island-according-to-archaeologists

 

[ramonmercado]

The first cowboys were slaves.

Think “cowboy,” and you might picture John Wayne riding herd across the U.S. West. But the first cowboys lived in Mexico and the Caribbean, and most of them were Black.

That’s the conclusion of a recent analysis of DNA from 400-year-old cow bones excavated on the island of Hispaniola and at sites in Mexico. The work, published in Scientific Reports, also provides evidence that African cattle made it to the Americas at least a century earlier than historians realized.

The timing of these African imports—to the early 1600s—suggests the growth of cattle herds may have been connected to the slave trade, says study author Nicolas Delsol, an archaeozoologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History. “It changes the whole perspective on the mythical figure of the cowboy, which has been whitewashed over the 20th century.”

The first cattle in the Americas came from Spain, brought by Christopher Columbus to the island of Hispaniola on his second voyage in 1493. More came in subsequent voyages in the early 1500s. The vast herds that later spread across the Americas, historians have assumed, descended from this small founding population of about 500 cows.

To understand the spread of cattle, Delsol scoured museum collections for cattle bones from postcontact Hispaniola and Mexico. The authors compared genetic signatures in the DNA from 21 cows found at early Spanish sites in Mexico and Haiti to known European and African breeds.

During the first century of European colonization, most cow bones correspond with varieties known from Spain. But one bone, from the grounds of an early Franciscan convent in the heart of modern-day Mexico City called Bellas Artes, yielded DNA matching a breed of cattle found only in Africa.


https://www.science.org/content/art...re-enslaved-africans-ancient-cow-dna-suggests