Archaeology Magazine - September/October 2012 - 49

INCE 2002, THIAW AND Raina Lynn Croﬀ, at that time a

Y University doctoral candidate, have separately excaale vated a rich array of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century consumer goods at sites all over the island—Wedgwood china, smoking pipes, glass beads, gin bottles, Chinese porcelain, and French faience. These artifacts speak of globalized trade and prosperity. The writer Boilat, after returning to Gorée from France in 1842, was struck by the variety of objects he saw at its markets and homes. In his classic study, Esquisses Sénégalaises (“Senegalese Sketches”), he described seeing “textiles made in Rouen, handkerchiefs of all colors, men’s vests, shoes for both sexes, … gunpowder, lead pellets, bullets, riﬂes, good wine, liquors, and beer for the overseers.” That list could serve as a partial inventory for what archaeologists are ﬁnding today. “Gorée had a class-based, not

says. They were essentially trapped on the island, “a kind of Alcatraz,” she explains, with sharks and strong currents ensuring they stayed put. Some Bambaras were brought to the mainland in work gangs—a French engineer in 1767 reported that 10 men, “well-managed and the elite among the slaves,” made 10,000 pounds of lime a week for use as a building material on Gorée. Bambaras were sometimes sold into the America-bound slavers that passed through, already stocked with human chattel from coasts further south, according to period accounts. The neighborhood of the Village des Bambaras today is a dense warren of lime-and-mortar houses, bougainvillea bushes, and shady squares where boys play soccer under the shadow of an 1830 French church. But in layers corresponding to the early and mid-1700s, Croﬀ has found dozens of postholes and sandy ﬂoor surfaces, leading archaeologists to conclude that at that time the area would have been covered in African-style round huts with thatched roofs. From that period, on this part of the island, there are no signs of European-style buildings. The ceramics Croﬀ found dating from the same period are almost exclusively African, as are a rich variety of delicately carved pipes. Interestingly, Thiaw also found European perfume and alcohol bottles in the same layers, suggesting slaves had access to European liquor and niceties even while living in a separate slave district. Thiaw says he does not know whether the slaves took these items from their masters’ pantries or if they were given them as gifts, but he believes they provide more evidence that slaves lived fairly autonomously in the Village des Bambaras. Croﬀ ’s excavations in the quarter—where she believes free Africans may also have lived—revealed up to nine diﬀerent

Thiaw and an assistant, Saïdon Camara, sort through boxes of recently excavated dinner plates, liquor bottles, and ceramic jars once used by Gorée’s slave-owning elite.

race-based, slavery system. African-born masters owned African slaves, although there were also European-blood masters,” says Croﬀ, currently a researcher at Oregon Health and Science University. “The domestic and transit slavery markets were all linked, and the huge proﬁts as reﬂected in the archaeological record were derived from the forced labor that slaves provided.” Slavery on Gorée was constantly evolving to suit the needs of Europeans who came to the island as traders, sailors, colonial administrators, and inland slave-hunters. Thiaw and Croﬀ have both excavated in a neighborhood in the center of the island still known today as Village des Bambaras. The Bambara people were from inland Senegal and Mali and had an unfortunate reputation for being excellent slaves. Boilat wrote that they “have a strong constitution and love to work.” The term “Bambara” later came to mean any Gorée resident slave of any ethnic group. Those shipped to America were called captifs (“captives”) and, in the social hierarchy of slavery that developed on the island, had lower status than Bambaras. The French brought Bambaras en masse to the island around 1700 to build forts, roads, and houses. “They were marched to the coast. Many of them had never seen the ocean before, and then they were brought to this island to do backbreaking labor building public works,” Croﬀ
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Village des Bambaras, once the site of a domestic slave community, may have been destroyed by fire in 1761.

ﬂoor surfaces, each a bit more solid and less porous than the one before. Floors that were ﬁrst made of compacted sand were eventually replaced by solid lime-and-clay surfaces, indicating continual home improvement. African ritual practices may also have persisted in the village. Thiaw found a metal can containing chunks of charcoal and quartz and a folded piece of paper—a pagan ritual oﬀering—that had been buried in front of a house that no longer exists. And Croﬀ found four empty, open, intact wine bottles beneath the ﬂoor of a dwelling. That discovery puzzled her until a local member of her team explained that even today rural Senegalese bury bottles beneath ﬂoors as a way of protecting the household from malevolent spirits.
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Archaeology Magazine - September/October 2012

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