COLOGNE, GERMANY—According to a Live Science report, M. Dores Cruz of the University of Cologne and her colleagues have found early evidence for the practice of plantation slavery at Praia Melão, the recently identified site of a sixteenth-century sugar mill on the northeastern coast of the island of São Tomé. The Portuguese inhabited the island, which is located off the coast of West Africa in the Gulf of Guinea, in the late fifteenth century. They soon found, however, that migrants to the previously uninhabited island endured high rates of malaria. Convicts, Jewish children, and enslaved Africans were soon forced to work there, harvesting and processing sugar cane, and building and maintaining the sugar mills. Praia Melão includes a large stone two-story building with a clay roof. Its lower floor served as a sugar boiling room, while domestic quarters were placed on the upper floor. Fragments of cone-shaped sugar molds similar to those found at Portuguese sugar mills in Madeira have also been recovered at the site. By 1530, plantations on São Tomé were so profitable that additional sugar mills were constructed, but the Portuguese eventually moved much of their sugar production to Brazil in the early seventeenth century. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Antiquity. To read about excavations at a hub of the transatlantic slave trade, go to "Letter from Ghana: Life Outside the Castle."
Early Island Sugar Plantation Site Investigated
News August 17, 2023
Recommended Articles
Features March/April 2024
Freedom Fort
In eighteenth-century Spanish Florida, a militia composed of formerly enslaved Africans fought for their liberty
Artifacts September/October 2023
Padlock
Letter from Ghana November/December 2021
Life Outside the Castle
At Christiansborg Castle, a community that embodied the complexity of the transatlantic slave trade is being uncovered by descendants of those who created it
Digs & Discoveries November/December 2021
Identifying the Unidentified
-
Features July/August 2023
An Elegant Enigma
The luxurious possessions of a seventeenth-century woman continue to intrigue researchers a decade after they were retrieved from a shipwreck
(Courtesy Museum Kaapskil; Courtesy Museum Kaapskil/© National Portrait Gallery, London) -
Features July/August 2023
Rise of the Persian Princes
In their grand capital Persepolis, Achaemenid rulers expressed their vision of a prosperous, multicultural empire
(Borna_Mir/ Adobe Stock) -
Letter from Patagonia July/August 2023
Surviving a Windswept Land
For 13,000 years, hunter-gatherers thrived in some of the world’s harshest environments
(Courtesy Raven Garvey) -
Artifacts July/August 2023
Norse Gold Bracteate
(Arnold Mikkelsen, National Museum of Denmark)