Rio's Cemetery of New Blacks sheds light on horrors of slave trade

Locals called it the "cemetery of the new blacks", but in truth it wasn't much of a cemetery. Devoid of headstones, wreaths or tearful mourners, this squalid harbourside burial ground was the final resting place for thousands of Africans shipped into slavery. The new world greeted them with a lonely death in an unfamiliar land.

For decades the cemetery and those buried there between 1760 and 1830 were forgotten, hidden under layer after layer of urban development. But 15 years after the cementyery`s the fortuitous discover.

Archaeologists believe as many as 20,000 slaves may have been buried at the cemetery, mostly men aged 18-25 who died during the gruelling journey to Brazil or shortly after arriving.

Is stimated at least 3 million slaves shipped from Africa to Brazil between 1550 and 1888, when the practice was officially abolished. This 3 million slaves who made the journey were previously thought to have come only from what is now Nigeria and from the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Cape Verde. But the study of teeth from 30 partial skeletons, using Strontium isotopes analyses, has hinted that slaves arriving in Rio came from a much wider geographical, like atlantic and pacific coast, but too from the interior of africa, no only from coastal areas.

                                                                                        "People weren't buried in tombs, they were tossed away into mass graves, It was ugly: a dump  which bodies were thrown and burned," said the bioarcheologist Sheila Mendonça de Souza.

Orilginal link of this summary:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/20/rio-cemetery-of-the-new-blacks-brazil?INTCMP=SRCH