fyi....


"If necessity is the mother of invention, then crises is the mother of change..and how we deal with change is a measure of our character."  (rdc -08)

Rodney D. Coates
Professor of Sociology and Gerontology
Miami University
Oxford, Ohio 45056
 513 - 529 1590
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Africans Came with Columbus to New World

By LiveScience Staff
posted: 20 March 2009 12:47 pm ET
<http://www.livescience.com/history/090320-columbus-teeth.html>

A team of researchers is extracting the chemical
details of life history from the remains found at
shallow graves at the site of La Isabela, the first
European town in America, said T. Douglas Price, a
University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of
anthropology and leader of the team conducting an
analysis of the tooth enamel of three individuals from
a larger group excavated almost 20 years ago there.

Three of the individuals' teeth subjected to isotopic
analysis by the Wisconsin group were males under the
age of 40 and had carbon isotope profiles far different
from the rest, suggesting an Old World origin (Africa
or Europe).

"I would bet money this person was an African," Price
says of one of the three individuals whose teeth were
subjected to analysis.

It was known that Columbus had a personal African slave
on his voyages of discovery. It is unknown whether the
individual studied by Price and his colleagues was a
slave or a crew member. The new analysis could mean
that Africans played a much larger role in the first
documented explorations of America.

If confirmed, that would put Africans in the New World
as contemporaries of Columbus and decades before they
were thought to have first arrived as slaves.

Headstones long gone

Price and colleague James Burton, in collaboration with
researchers from the Autonomous University of the
Yucatan in Mexico, are attempting to flesh out the
details of the La Isabela colony that lasted less than
five years.

Columbus left crew members on the island of Hispaniola
after his second voyage to America in 1493-94.

The human remains used in the study were buried without
the formalities of coffins or shrouds, and were
excavated from what was once the church graveyard of
the town Columbus established. Headstones and other
identifying markers have long since faded to nothing or
have been lost entirely during the 500 years since the
bodies were first interred.

La Isabela

Despite its brief existence, historians and
archaeologists believe La Isabela was a substantial
settlement with a church, public buildings such as a
customhouse and storehouse, private dwellings and
fortifications. It is also the only known settlement in
America where Columbus actually lived.

Although the town has been the subject of previous
archaeological studies, the work by Price, Burton and
their colleague Vera Tiesler and Andrea Cucina of the
Autonomous University of the Yucatan is revealing new
insight into the people who lived and sailed with
Columbus, and who died on the shores of a strange new
world.

Histories of La Isabela, named after Spain's queen and
Columbus's patron and located in what is today the
Dominican Republic, suggest its population was made up
only of men from the fleet of 17 vessels that comprised
Columbus's second visit to the New World.

But the new analysis of the remains of 20 individuals
excavated two decades ago by Italian and Dominican
archaeologists portray a different picture, suggesting
that living among the Spaniards at La Isabela were
native Taínos, women and children, and possibly
individuals of African origin.

Isotopic analysis

The unpublished study relied on isotopic analysis of
three elements: carbon, oxygen and strontium.
Carbon isotope ratios provide reliable evidence of diet
at the time an individual's adult teeth emerge in
childhood. For example, people who eat maize, as
opposed to those who consume wheat or rice, have
different carbon isotope ratio profiles locked in their
tooth enamel.

"Heavy carbon means you were eating tropical grasses
such as maize, found only in the New World, or millet
in Africa, neither of which was consumed in Europe" at
the time, said Burton.
Oxygen isotopes provide information about water
consumption and also can say something about geography
as the isotopic composition of water changes in
relation to latitude and proximity to the ocean.

Strontium is a chemical found in bedrock and that
enters the body through the food chain as nutrients
pass from bedrock to soil and water and, ultimately, to
plants and animals. The strontium isotopes found in
tooth enamel, the most stable and durable material in
the human body, thus constitute an indelible signature
of where someone lived as a child.

The strontium isotope analysis, Price notes, is not yet
complete, as samples from the teeth of the presumed
sailors remain to be matched with strontium profiles of
Spanish soils. However, such matches could open an
intriguing window to the personal identities of
individuals buried in La Isabela.

"All of these sailors - their place of birth, their age
- were recorded in Seville before they left on the
second voyage," Price said. "One of the things we're
hoping to do with the strontium is identify
individuals."

The skeletons also exhibit evidence of scurvy, a common
affliction of 15th century sailors who lacked vitamin C
on their long voyages, as well as signs of malnutrition
and physical stress. Chronicles of the voyage noted
that most of the Europeans, including Columbus himself,
fell sick shortly after landfall on Hispaniola, and
many subsequently died, perhaps becoming the first to
be buried in the La Isabela church graveyard.

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