NewsWhore
05-18-2009, 06:20 PM
Over the last few years, sophisticated chemical studies on the skeletons of Christopher Columbus's crewmembers from the 17 ships that came when the first settlement in the Americas was built are producing some interesting results. The studies, especially on their teeth, have begun to yield new insights into the lives and origins of Columbus's crew. The studies hint that, among other things, crewmembers may have included free black Africans who arrived in the New World about a decade before the slave trade began.
The study of the La Isabela skeletons grew out of a project in Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, where in 2000 researchers were surprised to find the remains of West Africans among those buried in a mid-16th-century church cemetery in Campeche. Vera Tiesler and Andrea Cucina from the Autonomous University of Yucatan invited T. Douglas Price, director of the Laboratory for Archaeological Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, to do isotopic analyses of those skeletons' teeth.
See: www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/17/... (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/17/AR2009051701885.html)
More... (http://www.dr1.com/index.html#8)
The study of the La Isabela skeletons grew out of a project in Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, where in 2000 researchers were surprised to find the remains of West Africans among those buried in a mid-16th-century church cemetery in Campeche. Vera Tiesler and Andrea Cucina from the Autonomous University of Yucatan invited T. Douglas Price, director of the Laboratory for Archaeological Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, to do isotopic analyses of those skeletons' teeth.
See: www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/17/... (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/17/AR2009051701885.html)
More... (http://www.dr1.com/index.html#8)