Slavery of Indigenous People in the Caribbean: An Archaeological Perspective
- PDF / 1,501,762 Bytes
- 29 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 8 Downloads / 331 Views
Slavery of Indigenous People in the Caribbean: An Archaeological Perspective Roberto Valcárcel Rojas 1 & Jason E. Laffoon 2 Menno L. P. Hoogland 2 & Corinne L. Hofman 2
& Darlene
A. Weston 3
&
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract European enslavement of Indigenous peoples in the Americas began in the Caribbean, quickly spreading to the rest of the continent and impacting the lives of millions. Despite its centrality to the creation of the colonial Caribbean, is still an understudied subject. This article summarizes the archaeological evidence on the topic and discusses the utility of the archaeological approach based on research conducted at the Cuban site of El Chorro de Maíta. The analyses of diet and paleodemography indicate substantial changes when compared to precolonial Indigenous populations. Indicators of ethnic diversity and geographic origin, as well as the mortuary patterns and distribution of material culture help to identify the presence of slaves. Keywords Indian slavery . Caribbean archaeology . Spanish colonialism . Cuba
For many historians and philosophers the European colonization of the Western Hemisphere initiated modernity and allowed Europe and Western civilization to become the main economic-military power, as well as the predominant social and cultural paradigm, on a global level (Dussel 1994; Mignolo 2009; Quijano 2000). While the validity of this assertion is debatable there is no doubt that slavery was a fundamental tool in these historical processes (Davis 2006; Patterson 1982). When considering slavery in the New World, both general and scholarly discourses are dominated by allusions to plantations in the southern United States, the Antilles, and Brazil, or to the This article shows photographs of human remains.
* Roberto Valcárcel Rojas [email protected]
1
Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo (INTEC), Av. de Los Próceres, Apartado postal 342-9 Urbanización Gala, Santo Domingo, Distrito Nacional, Dominican Republic
2
Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, Einsteinweg 2, 2333CC Leiden, The Netherlands
3
Department of Anthropology, University of British Columbia, 6303 NW Marine Dr., Vancouver, BC V6T1Z1, Canada
International Journal of Historical Archaeology
transatlantic slave trade. In these cases slavery was based mainly on a workforce of African origin, primarily connected to the capitalist market, and involved the forced displacement of between 11 and 12 million people (Davis 2006: 81, 90). This type of slavery not only marks the colonial history of the Americas until the nineteenth century but continues to impact the course of global history to this day. However, the enslavement of Africans influenced and coexisted with, and in turn was influenced and even driven by, a much less recognized and understudied form of slavery that began earlier and reached a similar and sometimes even longer duration: that of indigenous peoples of the Americas or “Indians” (Gallay 2010; Heerman 2017; Reséndez 2016; Stone 2014). The enslave
Data Loading...
