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at was it for slavery in the americas and the complicated relationship it had with the depopulation of native peoples but the story continues in africa after the end of the transatlantic slave trade and takes some further unexpected twists during the period of the transatlantic slave trade the permanent european presence in africa was minimal and the vast majority of the trade was carried out between visiting european traders and african traders on land there were a few exceptions the portuguese had a few permanent colonies on the offshore islands and on the mainland most importantly in angola as well as a significant number of portuguese traders who lived and often married among the local people at many points along the coast the french had permanent colonies in senegal starting in the seventeenth century and the british soon followed with a station on the gambia river the most important region for permanent european trade on the africa coast however was what was then known as the gold coast now ghana where several european countries established forts initially to take advantage of the gold trade but which eventually became very involved in the slave trade as well the portuguese began this at elmina in the fifteenth century but were supplanted by the dutch who maintained a string of forts until the nineteenth century when they turned them over to the british who had their own network of forts the third major power in the region was denmark which turned its own forts over to the dutch shortly before the handover to the british and then of course there was the small dutch colony at the cape of good hope which ultimately passed into british hands as well but there were all small enclaves of europeans amidst vast and overwhelmingly independent african populations death rates for the few europeans were immense due to the unfamiliar disease environment which cut both ways africa was very much a non colonized continent especially compared to the americas by the early nineteenth century interest in colonization of africa had ticked up slightly in western circles but mostly as a way to deal with the increasing agitation for the abolition of slavery even many avid abolitionists were highly averse to the idea of free black populations coexisting with white ones so colonization somewhere not necessarily africa was a popular idea the two projects of this kind that went the furthest were the british colony at sierra leone which was populated by free black loyalists from nova scotia as well as recaptives from the british cruisers that were trying to intercept the illegal slave trade and liberia which was populated by free black americans neither really thrived in its early years again in part due to the disease environment despite what a lot of white people believed at the time black slaves relative immunity to many tropical diseases was due primarily to having personal experience of tropical environments rather than an innate racial immunity so by the middle of the nineteenth century colonization in africa was highly out of favor in europe west africa especially was commonly and accurately known as the white man s grave due to the high death rates at the few small enclaves and yet by the end of the century the scramble for africa led to a mad dash for colonies there not only by the traditional powers of britain and france but also newcomers to the colonial scene such as germany italy and belgium what happened the literature on this is of course immense and surely there were multiple factors involved but one contributing factor that i don t think has gotten enough attention is the immense growth and prosperity of the older colonies the ones that had benefited most from the depopulation of native peoples and an assumption among a society increasingly oriented toward white supremacy scientific racism and teleological theories of history that saw an unceasing march of progress this european society saw the rise of the united states especially and to a lesser degree canada australia and new zealand which obviously owed an initial boost to the massive depopulation of the indigenous societies and concluded that conquering and colonizing the world was the fate of progressive white societies with an assist by the dying off of the doomed primitive races that was assumed to be an inevitable part of the process the rather different outcomes in the spanish and portuguese colonies of latin america could easily be accommodated by the racist worldview that saw important distinctions within the overall white race so the european powers decided that a new wave of colonization of still primitive regions of the world was their national destiny and they went looking for worlds to conquer the main worlds remaining were in the small islands of the pacific parts of mainland southeast asia and most importantly the vast majority of africa a new wave of exploration helped fill in the european maps and it was followed and accompanied by a military and diplomatic presence intended to either seize land by conquest or establish protectorates over indigenous polities who were allegedly in need of protection either from themselves the british especially were very committed to justifying their acquisitions by the need to abolish slavery within africa as well as outside it or from other grasping europeans the rapid improvement of firearms technology helped these european armies defeat the african ones more decisively in the still notoriously unhealthy for europeans tropical regions the resulting colonies were generally not thought of as settler colonies but more as elaborations of the longstanding trade outposts now claiming and attempting to enforce control over the hinterlands as well in other parts of africa however which seemed healthier the colonial powers made large efforts to establish settler colonies like those in the americas and antipodes the prime examples were the french in algeria the british in an expanded south africa as well as new colonies like rhodesia and kenya the italians in eritrea and the germans in namibia all of these new efforts failed to varying degrees and africa went from lightly to entirely colonized then to entirely decolonized within a short span of well under 100 years the situation in the rest of the world was more complex but overall the second wave of european colonialism was a bust the national destiny turned out to not lie in this direction for any of these countries why not i would posit that a misunderstanding of the older colonies and the epidemiology of their rise led to the assumption that at some point the natives just inevitably die off in any colonial project by a sufficiently progressive modern white nation and then the real fun begins turns out that s not true and the americas and antipodes happened to have an unusually large disconnect in disease environments that couldn t just be replicated on command especially in regions like africa that had long been in contact albeit intermittent with the eurasian pathogenic continuum this wasn t the only reason the first wave of colonization succeeded or the second one failed of course but from my reading so far it seems under discussed israel arguably constitutes a third wave all on its own in which the lessons of both previous ones have been ignored so yeah that s the direction i m thinking that this project is taking not just a reassessment of the research on the depopulation of the americas and its causes although that is still an important component but the interconnected picture of colonization trade and disease across the entire world not just one hemisphere or the other the intellectual history of how these dynamics worked and were connected including advances in medical knowledge as well as racial ideas is also an important component it s a complex picture and i m sure my sketch of it here is incomplete and confused to some extent but it seems to me to be coming into focus posted in virgin soil widowed land 1 comment eclipse dating april 8 2024 by teofilo sun marker at edge of the cedars with bear s ears in background so there was a total solar eclipse today visible from a wide swath of the us though not alaska we ll get our chance in 2033 i also happen to have recently been reading about the use of eclipses to date events in oral tradition which is pretty cool the journal of african history published articles in 1965 and 1968 with maps of known solar eclipse paths total and annular respectively within the past few hundred years as part of a larger project to find ways of building chronologies for african history stretching back before european contact the 1968 article also includes a list of known eclipses mentioned in oral tradition and tentative identifications with specific dates the list includes an eclipse in uganda in 1520 associated with the oral traditions of the kingdoms of bunyoro and ankole as having occurred on the date of a battle between the two kingdoms with the names of the specific kings involved being preserved in both traditions this provides a crucial point for grounding the well preserved king lists of not just these two states but several others with which they interacted calibrating a whole regional chronology interesting another much later eclipse in 1835 coincided with the ngoni people s crossing of the zambezi river part of the large scale series of migrations in reaction to shaka s consolidation of the zulu kingdom also interesting the 1965 article goes into some detail on the distinction between total and partial eclipses in terms of the viewing experience something that a lot of americans have probably learned about today the most impressive effects and most likely to be preserved in oral tradition are of course those within the path of totality but this is a very narrow path and it can be hard to determine how close it needs to be to the remembered site of an event in the tradition to form a plausible association these articles basically settle on the idea that if the path of totality passed through territory associated with the ethnic group from which the tradition is drawn that is plausible enough even if the specific location in the tradition wasn t itself in the path of totality this seems reasonable to me i came across these articles as part of my reading on africa an outgrowth of my demographic history research project i ll have more to say on the african aspect to that which is quite interesting in its own right soon but for now i thought it was cool to bring up this eclipse stuff there s no conceptual reason this approach couldn t be used on the oral traditions of the americas as well but to my knowledge it hasn t it s possible that those traditions just don t have a lot of eclipses in them something to look into maybe posted in archaeoastronomy elsewhere history very far 2 comments la cieneguilla petroglyph site december 21 2023 by teofilo today is the winter solstice and the fifteenth anniversary of this blog so i thought i would take a break from my ongoing series on epidemics and depopulation to talk about an interesting rock art site i visited recently and its archaeoastronomical potential the la cieneguilla site is relatively obscure and i ve been able to find very little about it in published sources it is a few miles southwest of santa fe and is managed by the bureau of land management which has a very basic webpage about it but doesn t otherwise provide much information i ve been curious about it for many years and this fall i finally got the opportunity to visit it i had quite a hard time finding the actual petroglyphs there it s a semi developed site but the wayfinding is limited and confusing part of the purpose of this post is to clarify how to get to the actual petroglyphs which is not obvious or at least wasn t to me from the entrance to the site starting from the parking lot there is a trail that leads to a sign giving some basic information then there is a trail leading to the petroglyphs themselves actually there are trails going in two directions take the one going left from the sign it continues along a fence for a ways then turns right at the foot of the escarpment and sort of fades away the petroglyphs are on a series of boulders at the top of the escarpment and there isn t really a single well defined trail to get to them you have to kind of feel your way around the boulders which cover the entire escarpment it s much easier if you already know where the petroglyphs are which i did not when i first visited as i was leaving i met some people coming up and pointed out the petroglyphs from the bottom of the escarpment to help them get there easier than i had the escarpment and boulder field extend for many miles in both directions but the petroglyphs are heavily concentrated in a small area escarpments with boulder fields like this are common locations for petroglyphs in this region petroglyph national monument in albuquerque contains several but this concentration in one small area is unusual more on that later the petroglyphs themselves generally seem to be classified as part of the rio grande style which is a late prehistoric style common in the upper rio grande valley and includes the albuquerque petroglyphs it is generally dated to the pueblo iv or rio grande classic period there are indeed many stylistic similarities at la cieneguilla to the other rio grande style sites but there are also some interesting differences that suggest to me that it may be somewhat older most noticeably there are few of the face or mask images that are so common in the rio grande style and may derive from the jornada style found earlier to the south similarly there is little use of the shape of the rock surface to create 3 d type images often associated with the masks at other jornada and rio grande style sites instead there are many spirals birds and stylized human figures including flute players motifs commonly found at earlier sites to the north and west including chaco canyon so back to the clustering unlike the sites at petroglyph national monument where petroglyphs cover wide swathes of the boulder fields the la cieneguilla petroglyphs are concentrated in just a very small area at the top of the escarpment the rocks themselves don t seem to have any particular distinction relative to the rest of the boulder field so something else must have driven this concentration the escarpment generally faces east the direction of sunrise so an astronomical alignment of some kind occurred to me as i was looking at them i stood in front of one of the most elaborate panels and turned around to look at the horizon the horizon was broken another common feature of astronomical observation sites there is a distant range of hills or low mountains that occupies the center of one s field of vision along the horizon from this exact spot this would be an excellent place to observe a sunrise on an important occasion i thought but when i t...
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