Social Life and Social Death among Cape Slaves

Summary

A central imperative in historical archaeology is to produce original information and insights that cannot be derived from historical records. Sophisticated analyses of slave burials that combine the physical elements of burial grounds, coffins, and grave goods, with the biology and chemical signatures of the human remains, can identify and source first-generation slaves, and help to infer the social bonds reflected in their burial.

Orlando Patterson has defined slavery as "social death" to reflect the nature and impact of forced translocation and cultural depletion. Unassailable as this might seem at first glance, recent work in underclass burial grounds at the Cape and elsewhere, challenge this deathly pronouncement by suggesting that slaves from a multiplicity of foreign homelands were incorporated into a vibrant community of free and unfree people and who nurtured them beyond their short life into the long comfort of death. This finding casts a new light on the historical records to reveal the permeable nature of slave society in the wider colonial world.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21419