Cape Town Slaves

Questions Were the individuals buried in the unknown graveyard in Cape Town 

Glenda, Judith Sealy, Carmel Schrire, and Alan Morris 2001 Stable carbon and nitrogen isotopic analyses of the underclass at the colonial Cape of Good Hope in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. World Archaeology 33(l) 73-97. 

Europeans from the Netherlands first settled at the Cape of Good Hope on the southern tip of Africa in 1652 to establish rest and repair station for ships sailing between northern Europe and the Far East. More than 60,000 slaves were brought to Cape Town, until a ban on the slave trade in 1808. Slaves were brought into the colony shortly after the initial settlement because more workers were needed for food production. The slaves were equally from Africa and Asia. Africans were brought from Madagascar and East Africa, and Asians from India, Sri Lanka and the Indonesian archipelago. African slaves usually worked as laborers Indians, Indonesians and free blacks were craftsmen, artisans, builders, coachmen, and hawkers. Women worked as laundresses, wet nurses, and household servants. 

A plot of nitrogen and carbon isotopes in the tooth dentine reveals two distinct 

The seven individuals in the small cluster have more positive values and relatively low 5 N ratios. This group was eating largely terrestrial, foods in childhood. Moreover, all seven of these individuals had similarly modified front teeth, flaked and filed to produce a pointed appearance (Fig. 7.17). This cultural practice is well known from Africa and was thought to enhance one s physical attractiveness. This pattern of modification is known to have been practiced in Mozambique. These seven distinctive individuals were very likely bom in Mozambique and brought to Cape Town as slaves. On the other hand, four out of five of the Type C burials have very negative values, and appear as outliers on the left-hand side of the graph. Their diets were based on C, plants from temperate environments. 

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Davies R. M., Griffin W. L., Pearson N. J., Andrew A. S., Doyle B. J., and O Reilly S. Y. (1999) Diamonds from the deep pipe DO-27, Slave Craton, Canada. In The J. B. Dawson Volume Proceedings of the Vllth International Kimberlite Conference (eds. J. J. Gurney, J. L. Gurney, M. D. Pascoe, andS. H. Richardson). Red Roof Designs, Cape Town, vol. 1,... 

Ledger. M.. L. Holtzhausen. D. Constant, and A.G. Morris. 2000. Biomechanical beam analysis of long bones from a late 18th century slave cemetery in Cape Town, South Africa. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 112 207-216. 

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