My African Burial Ground essay

The African Burial Ground is located in down-town Manhattan, it is where the many body's of freed and enslaved Africans were found.During the building of a federal office building in 1991 the construction workers found SOME human remains, but it didn't seem like a major problem. Then more and more bones started showing up.They did become a major problem for them so they had to postpone the building and turn it into an excavation site. Soon after that archaeologists were digging for bones and examining them one-by-one to see if they could find anything about that person or a written document of some type but they couldn't find any thing.This means that the black people weren't counted as a '' population '' .The white people thought that the black people could be disposed of or that they weren't smart enough to be human.They thought that they were so much like animals that they shouldn't be counted as a population.

The original burial ground was closed in 1794.

The African burial grounds name gives away a clue as to what race the people who were buried there were, but they came from many different parts of Africa. Archaeologists believe that most of them came from west Africa because of the way some of the body's were positioned and what they were buried with.Another reason why archaeologists say this is because sankofa ( a west African symbol) was found on one of the coffins and many others were buried with beads around there waists which was a west African tradition.

In the 1700's African Americans were working hard to build and improve a society that they weren't really welcome in.Slaves were sold on wall street every week.The men were sold for fifteen cents and the women and children were sold for half the amount.Many children died from working to hard.

When slaves were in new Amsterdam under dutch rule, the living conditions of slaves improved allot because they started getting a little freedom then they had under English rule. When the dutch had slaves they treated them with almost as many rights as they had themselves ,but still they were slaves and weren't so free or as free as the dutch or white people.Then the dutch created the rule that the adult slaves could be '' half - free'' so they had half the rights of free people and there children had to be '' full - slaves''.