Beached Lives in The Recife Port, Brazil: First Insights in Diets and Mobility of the People from Pilar Cemetery, 16th to the 18th centuries.

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Port of Call: Archaeologies of Labor and Movement through Ports", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

This research focuses on the city of Recife, Pernambuco, Northeast Brazil, from the 16th to the 18th centuries. Recently archaeological excavations inside the Port of Recife revealed that the occupation of the area was first established as a fortress in the 16th century. Later, the area became one of the main ports for boarding and unloading colonial goods, including enslaved African people brought by force during the Transatlantic slave trade. Near the fortress, a vast colonial cemetery was found. This work presents the first insights into the diet and the possible origin of this colonial population by the intersection of the stable isotope and bioarchaeological analyses with the written sources. We intend to analyze these results in the context of the first European colonial migrations to South America, in special the New Holland colony of the Dutch Republic in the northeastern portion of modern-day Brazil.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023   •
• Port of Call: Archaeologies of Labor and Movement through Ports

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow