Early Africans in the New World
Stable isotope analysis has assisted in identifying what may be among the earliest Africans born in the New World, and perhaps indications of slave trade in the early 16th century between West Africa and the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. Results of these investigations will be published in an upcoming article in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
Slavery and the Spanish Colonial Town of Campeche
The Mayan town of Campeche is located on the west coast of the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. Founded in the third century AD, Campeche was first visited by the Spanish in 1517, when it was a provincial capital of the Maya civilization and held about 3,000 individuals led by a cacique named Lázaro. Although the Maya fought and won a battle with the Spanish at Campeche in 1518, Spanish colonization proceeded.
According to historical documents, shortly after the initial colonization by the Spanish, African slaves were brought to the Yucatan. Forty years later, Campeche had become an important port for the Spanish in a newly walled central city, surrounded by outlying communities of Maya and other indigenous people. By the mid-16th century, the city’s plaza had been transformed by the occupation, and included a church, a cemetery, and a fort with bastions, called Fort San Jose el Alto. The church, built of lime and plaster about 1541, was destroyed about 1580, and the replacement cathedral—the Cathedral of the Conception, still standing today—built beginning 1639.
A Forgotten Cemetery
During the summer of 2000, archaeological investigations were conducted by Vera Tiesler Blos (Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan) and colleagues in the plaza of Campeche, and the foundations of the 16th century Spanish church and cemetery were identified. In the cemetery were the skeletal remains of 180 people, some of whom could be identified by dental morphology as ethnically Native American or European; but several individuals appeared to be African or of African descent, based on the evidence of tooth filing and mutilation. Tooth modification was a fairly common practice among pre-colonial West African societies, and involved the chipping or filing away of the inside corners of the upper front incisors to form a small triangular opening. Whether this was intentional (for decoration or family identification) or resulted from using the teeth as a tool for some unidentified purpose has been debated, but the practice is common enough to be regularly used by archaeologists to identify African-born people in the New World.
The presence of these markings on four of the African ethnic individuals piqued the interest of archaeologists T. Douglas Price and James Burton of the University of Wisconsin’s Laboratory for Archaeological Chemistry Stable Isotope Laboratory, who analyzed teeth from burials from the cemetery without knowing about possible African connections. Their report is scheduled to appear in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
