Found: Oldest Evidence of African Slaves in New World

The oldest remains of African slaves in the New World have been identified in a graveyard in Campeche, Mexico -- skeletons dating from the late 16th century, about 100 years after Christopher Columbus set sail for the New World.

The use of African slaves by Spanish conquistadors has been known through writings dating from the period, but the skeletons represent the first scientific evidence confirming the practice at such an early date.

“It means that slaves were brought here almost as soon as Europeans arrived,” said T. Douglas Price, an archeologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Price’s results were announced this week and will be published in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

The skeletons were found in 2000 by workers remodeling the central plaza in Campeche, the first port established by Spain on the Yucatan Peninsula. The 180 graves, discovered near the foundation of a colonial-era church, were excavated by Vera Tiesler of the Autonomous University of the Yucatan.

Tiesler surmised that four of the skeletons were African in origin because their teeth had been filed in a distinctive pattern found in some parts of that continent -- although the individuals could have been indigenous people who had similar decorative practices.

To confirm their origin, Tiesler sent 10 teeth from various types of skeletons to Price and his colleague James H. Burton, who specialize in analyzing strontium levels in the enamel of teeth to identify the geographic origins of ancient peoples.

Burton said he assumed all the samples were Mesoamerican teeth. Indeed, six were. Strontium readings from four, however, “were like nothing we had ever seen,” he said, suggesting that they originated in a area underlain by ancient granite bedrock.

There are no such locations in Central America, but that describes Ghana, which sits atop a 1-billion-year-old geologic formation called the West Africa craton. Ghana also played an infamous role in the slave trade beginning in the 1500s.

African slaves in the Americas were initially used as household workers; most of the forced labor was performed by indigenous peoples. But as European diseases wiped out native populations, Africans began to replace them.

Over 400 years, as many as 12 million Africans were forced to come to the Americas as slaves.