The Life of a Slave

As part of an archaeology class I took last year, I started studying  slave cemeteries in the Antilles. I found this subject to be really fascinating, because there is a lot of written information about slaves, but since the vast majority of these documents were created by slave owners, we don’t get to see the whole picture. Slave cemeteries represent a great opportunity to get a get a better understanding of what being a slave meant.

For example, in the Antilles, slaves were forced to convert to Christianity, and if they refused they could not be buried in a cemetery, instead their body would be thrown unceremoniously in a hole somewhere in the plantation. A question that deserves to be asked, is whether or not the converted slaves completely gave up on their African beliefs. Since the Christian burial practices are well known, it is possible to detect some artefacts or aspects of burials that could be associated African practices.

Another aspect that I find really interesting is the sanitary conditions in which slaves lived. It is generally assumed that these conditions were pretty bad, but to what extent? In Guadeloupe, there is a giant slave cemetery believed to hold the remains of a thousand persons, the site is known as Anse Sainte-Marguerite. At the moment, a little more than 200 individuals have been excavated and almost all of the skeletons showed at least scarce traces of tuberculosis, but surprisingly only a few of them showed signs of injuries.What does this tell us about their lives?

Sources:

Courtaud, Patrice, « L’esclavage à l’époque coloniale : Contribution de l’archéologie funéraire. Le cimetière d’Anse Sainte-Marguerite », dans Les esclavages en Amérique coloniale, Grunberg, Bernard (dir.), Paris, Éditions L’harmattan, 2013, p. 141-154.

Hopquin, Benoit, «Sainte-Marguerite: le cimetière, miroir de l'esclavage.» La Guadeloupe, histoire, Monde, UGTG.org, 1999, 2010. p.5.

A bit about myself

Hello everyone,

My is Maude, I'm an exchange student currently studying at the University of Victoria. I'm from Montreal so my first language is obviously not english, but I am here to learn. This is now my third year studying anthropology, I am particularly interested in archaeology and biological anthropology. Back at my home University I took a lot of archaeology classes, but they were mainly about the Saint-Lawrence Iroquoians, and I can wait to learn more about the archaeology of death because it is very different from  what I have learned so far.