Slave Trade and Colonialism in African Islands from the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Islands around Africa: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

One key period of history involved the forced migration of millions of people due to slavery. Information on the origins of the enslaved individuals has been reconstructed from historical records and, more recently, through the use of paleogenomic techniques. However, all these ancient DNA studies have been performed on mainland Americas and the Caribbean, leaving other geographical regions understudied. In this project, we explore the history of slavery and the impact of colonialism in Mauritius and the Canary Islands, where enslaved people were brought during colonial times through the Indian Ocean and the trans-Atlantic slave trade, respectively. For that, we use next-generation sequencing of ancient DNA to estimate the genome-wide ancestries of individuals sampled in the cemeteries of Albion (n=8) and Le Morne (n=26) in Mauritius, and Finca Clavijo (n=) and Juan Rejón (n=1) in the Canary Islands. Ancestry inference indicates that individuals from Mauritius had ancestries related to not only mainland Africa and Madagascar but also from Europe and South Asia. For the Canary Islands, enslaved individuals had sub-Saharan African, North African, Middle Eastern, European, and Canarian indigenous ancestries. Our results provide insight into the complex demographic history of Mauritius and the Canary Islands.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Islands around Africa: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40124.0