Little is known about the tens of thousands of liberated Africans who were buried on the remote Atlantic island of St. Helena in the 19th century. But now, a new chemical and dental analysis reveals where more than 150 of these individuals spent their childhoods in Africa.
About 27,000 liberated slaves ended up on St. Helena after the British Empire outlawed slave trading in 1807, with the Royal Navy enforcing the ban. St. Helena was used to drop off enslaved people whom the navy had liberated. However, about 8,000 of these newly liberated people, who were malnourished and in poor health, died on the South Atlantic island not long after landing there.
These burials were forgotten until they were found ahead of an airport construction project centuries later. The dig, carried out in 2007 and 2008, found the buried skeletons of the liberated slaves, according to a new study published Thursday (July 16) in the journal Science.
To determine the origins of the liberated slaves, scientists studied the teeth of 152 individuals, measuring the ratio of strontium isotopes, which are atoms of the element s...
English (US)