Abstract
Over the past three decades, there has been a growing body of research examining the history of African slavery in colonial Peru. These studies have contributed new information about the origins, roles, and experiences of enslaved peoples of African descent in colonial society. However, despite these advances, relatively few studies exist that directly examine the lives of enslaved women of African descent. This article responds to these concerns by using bioarchaeological evidence to examine the lives of enslaved women in conditions of plantation slavery in central Peru. As a case study, it focuses on recent bioarchaeological research at Hacienda La Quebrada, a former sugar estate located in the coastal region of Cañete, Peru. Research findings reveal the disproportionate impacts of conditions of plantation slavery on young women, many of whom perished by their twenties—an average of 10 years younger than enslaved men. Skeletal indicators of work offer further insights into these patterns, suggesting that enslaved women endured additional labor burdens while facing limited access to resources and care. These findings counter traditional narratives of enslavement in Peru that often center on the labor of adult men, instead illuminating the roles of women in the colonial economy and early Afro-Peruvian life. In doing so, this project offers a model of an intersectional approach to the study of African slavery in colonial Peru and to bioarchaeological studies of the African diaspora more broadly.
Similar content being viewed by others
Data Availability
The Proyecto de Investigación Arqueológica La Quebrada collections and associated catalogs are curated at the project’s laboratory in Quilmaná, Peru, under Ministry of Culture Resolution No. 472–2019/DGA/VMPCIC/MC.
References
Adams, B., and Byrd, J., Eds. (2014). Commingled human remains: Methods in recovery, analysis, and identification. Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-59745-316-5
Adams, B., & Konigsberg, L. (2004). Estimation of the most likely number of individuals from commingled human skeletal remains. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 125, 138–151. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.10381
Agbe-Davies, A. (2011). Reaching for freedom, seizing responsibility: Archaeology at the Phyllis Wheatley Home for Girls, Chicago. In J. A. Barnes (Ed.), The Materiality of Freedom: Archaeologies of Postemancipation Life (pp. 69–86). University of South Carolina Press.
Agorsah, K. (1993). Archaeology of resistance history in the Caribbean. African Archaeological Review, 11, 175–195.
Aguirre, C. (2005). Breve historia de la esclavitud en el Perú: una herida que no deja de sangrar. Fondo Editorial del Congreso del Perú.
Aidoo, L. (2018). Slavery unseen: Sex, power, and violence in Brazilian history. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822371687
Angel, J. L., Kelley, J. O., Parrington, M., & Pinter, S. (1987). Life stresses of slavery. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 74, 199–211. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.1330740208
Arrelucea, M. B. and Cosmalón, J. A. (2015). La presencia afrodescendiente en el Perú, siglos XVI-XX. Ministerio de Cultura.
Arrelucea, M. B. (2004). Historia de la esclavitud africana en el Perú desde la conquista hasta la abolición. Arqueología y Sociedad, 15:219–276. https://doi.org/10.15381/arqueolsoc.2004n15.e12743
Arrelucea, M. B. (2009). Replanteando la esclavitud: estudios de etnicidad y género en Lima borbónica. Centro de Desarrollo Étnico.
Barnes, J. A., ed. (2011). The materiality of freedom: Archaeologies of postemancipation life. University of South Carolina Press.
Bastos, M. Q. R., Santos, R. V., de Souza, S. M. F. M., Rodrigues-Carvalho, C., Tykot, R. H., Cook, D. C., & Santos, R. V. (2016). Isotopic Study of geographic origins and diet of enslaved Africans buried in two Brazilian cemeteries. Journal of Archaeological Science, 70, 82–90. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2016.04.020
Battle-Baptiste, W. (2011). Black feminist archaeology. Left Coast Press. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315096254
Beckles, H. (1989). Natural rebels: A social history of enslaved women in Barbados. Rutgers University Press.
Blakey, M. and Rankin-Hill, L., Eds. (2009). The African Burial Ground Project. Skeletal Biology Final Reports, Vols. 1 and 2. The African Burial Ground Project, Howard University for the United States General Services Administration, Northeast and Caribbean Region. https://doi.org/10.6067/XCV8NG4NNN
Blanchard, P. (1992). Slavery and abolition in early Republican Peru. SR Books.
Bowser, F. (1974). The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524–1650. Stanford University Press.
Brown, K. M. (1996). Good wives, nasty wenches, and anxious patriarchs: Gender, race, and power in colonial Virginia. University of North Carolina Press.
Buikstra, J. and Ubelaker, D. (1994). Standards for data collection from human skeletal remains: Proceedings of a seminar at the field museum of natural history. Arkansas Archaeological Survey Research.
Bush, B. (1990). Slave women in Caribbean society 1650–1838. Indiana University Press.
Camp, S. (2002). The Pleasures of Resistance: Enslaved Women and Body Politics in the Plantation South, 1830–1861. The Journal of Southern History, 68(3), 533–572. https://doi.org/10.2307/3070158
Camp, S. (2007). Closer to freedom: Enslaved women and everyday resistance in the plantation South. University of North Carolina Press.
Collins, P. H. (1986). Learning from the outsider within: The sociological significance of Black feminist thought. Social Problems, 33(6), 14–32. https://doi.org/10.2307/800672
Collins, P. H. (1991). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. Routledge.
Corruccini, R. S., Handler, J., Mutaw, R., & Lange, F. (1982). Osteology of a slave burial population from Barbados, West Indies. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 59, 443–459. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.1330590414
Cox, G., & Sealy, J. (1997). Investigating identity and life histories: Isotopic analysis and historical documentation of slave skeletons found on the Cape Town Foreshore, South Africa. International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 1(3), 207–224. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1027349115474
Crader, D. C. (1984). The zooarchaeology of the storehouse and the dry well at Monticello. American Antiquity, 49, 542–558. https://doi.org/10.2307/280359
Crader, D. C. (1990). Slave diet at Monticello. American Antiquity, 55, 690–717. https://doi.org/10.2307/281246
Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1(1), 139–167.
Crist, T. A., Roberts, D. G., Pitts, R. H., McCarthy, J. P., and Parrington, M. (1997). The first African baptist church cemeteries: African-American mortality and trauma in Antebellum Philadelphia. In D.A. Poirier and N.F. Bellantoni, N.F. (Eds.), In Remembrance: Archaeology and Death (pp. 19–14) Bergin & Garvey.
Deagan, K. and MacMahon, D. A. (1995). Fort Mose: Colonial America’s Black fortress of freedom. University Press of Florida.
Epperson, T. (1990). Race and the disciplines of the plantation. Historical Archaeology, 24(4), 29–36. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03373494
Epperson, T. (1999). The contested commons: Archaeologies of race, repression, and resistance in New York City. In M. Leone & P. Potter (Eds.), Historical Archaeologies of Capitalism (pp. 81–110). Plenum. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-4767-9
Fairbanks, C. (1974). The Kingsley slave cabins in Duval County, Florida, 1968. Conference on Historic Site Archaeology Papers, 7, 62–93.
Feinstein, R. A. (2018). When rape was legal: The untold history of sexual violence during slavery. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315210285
Ferguson, L. (1978). Looking for the “Afro-” in Colono-Indian pottery. Conference on Historic Site Archaeology Papers, 12, 68–86.
Flewellen, A. O. (2017). Locating marginalized historical narratives at Kingsley Plantation. Historical Archaeology, 51(1), 71–87. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41636-017-0005-7
Flewellen, A. O. (2020). African diasporic choices: Locating the lived experiences of Afro-Crucians in the archaeological and archival record. Nordic Journal of Information Science and Cultural Mediation. https://doi.org/10.7146/ntik.v7i2.118481
Franklin, M. (2001). A Black feminist-inspired archaeology? Journal of Social Archaeology, 1, 108–125. https://doi.org/10.1177/146960530100100108
Franklin, M., & McKee, L. (2004). Introduction African diaspora archaeologies: Present insights and expanding discourses. Historical Archaeology, 38(1), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03376628
Franklin, M. (1997). “Power to the people”: Sociopolitics and the archaeology of Black Americans. In C. McDavid and D.W, Babson (Eds.), In the Realm of Politics: Prospects for Public Participation in African- American and Plantation Archaeology, (pp. 36–50). Society for Historical Archaeology.
Fuentes, M. J. (2016). Dispossessed lives: Enslaved women, violence, and the archive. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Gaspar, D. B. and Hine, G. C. (1996). More than chattel: Black women and slavery in the Americas. Indiana University Press.
Gómez Acuña, L. (2001). La esclavitud en el Perú colonial. Apuntes: Revista De Ciencias Sociales, (48):29–52. https://doi.org/10.21678/apuntes.48.505
Gómez, P. F. (2017). The experiential Caribbean: Creating knowledge and healing in the early modern Atlantic. University of North Carolina Press. https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469630878.001.0001
Handler, J. and Corruccini, R. (1983). Plantation slave life at Barbados: A physical anthropological analysis. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 65-90.https://doi.org/10.2307/203517
hooks, b. (1981). Ain’t I a woman: Black woman and feminism. South End Press.
hooks, b. (1984). Feminist theory: From margin to center. South End Press.
Hull, A. G., Bell-Scott., P., & Smith, B. (1982). All the women are White, all the Blacks are men, but some of us are brave. The Feminist Press.
Hünefeldt, C. (1994). Paying the price of freedom: Family and labor among Lima’s slaves, 1800–1854. University of California Press.
Jenkins, T. (2020). An intersectional archaeology of women’s reproductive rights in early twentieth-century Easton. Maryland. Historical Archaeology, 54(3), 581–604. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41636-020-00256-2
Johnson, J. M. (2020). Wicked flesh: Black women, intimacy, and freedom in the Atlantic World. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Kelso, W. M. (1986). Mulberry Row: Slave life at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Archaeology, 39(5), 28–35.
Kelso, W. M. (1984). Kingsmill Plantations, 1619–1900: Archaeology of country life in colonial Virginia. Academic.
Khudabux, M. R. (1991). Effects of life conditions on the health of a negro slave community in Suriname. Rijksuniversiteit te Leiden.
La Roche, C., & Blakey, M. (1997). Seizing intellectual power: The dialogue at the New York African Burial Ground. Historical Archaeology, 31, 84–106. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03374233
Laffoon, J., Valcárcel Rojas, R., & Hofman, C. (2013). Oxygen and carbon isotope analysis of human dental enamel from the Caribbean: Implications for investigating individual origins. Archaeometry, 55(4), 742–765. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4754.2012.00698.x
Laffoon, J., Espersen, R., & Mickleburgh, H. (2018). The life history of an enslaved African: Multiple isotope evidence for forced childhood migration from Africa to the Caribbean and associated dietary change. Archaeometry, 60(2), 350–365. https://doi.org/10.1111/arcm.12354
Leone, M., La Roche, C., & Babiarz, J. (2005). The archaeology of Black Americans in recent times. Annual Review of Anthropology, 34, 575–598. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.34.081804.120417
Luna Obregón, J. (2005). Efigenia, la negra santa: Culto religioso de los descendientes africanos en el valle de Cañete. Centro de Desarrollo de la Mujer Negra Peruana.
Luna, P. (2017). El tránsito de la Buenamuerte por Lima: Auge y declive de una orden religiosa azucarera siglos XVIII y XIX. Iberoamericana.
Maass, C. (2022). Childhood in captivity: Bioarchaeological evidence from a late colonial sugar plantation in Central Peru. Latin American Antiquity, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1017/laq.2022.35
McCarthy, J. P. (1996). Who owns these bones?: Descendant communities and partnerships in the excavation and analysis of historic cemetery sites in New York and Philadelphia. Public Archaeology Review, 4(2), 3–12.
McKinley, M. (2016). Fractional freedoms: Slavery, intimacy, and legal mobilization in colonial Lima, 1600–1700. Cambridge University Press.
Mintz, S. and Price, R. (1976). An anthropological approach to the Afro-American past: A Caribbean perspective. Institute for the Study of Human Issues.
Moitt, B. (1995). Women, work and resistance in the French Caribbean during slavery 1700–1848. In V. Sheperd, B. Brereton, & B. Baily (Eds.), Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective (pp. 155–175). Palgrave Macmillan.
Morales Polar, M. A. (2008). El espacio del esclavo negro en las haciendas del valle de Cañete, 1747–1821. Investigaciones Sociales, 12(21):161–183. https://doi.org/10.15381/is.v12i21.7195
Morgan, J. L. (2004). Laboring women: Reproduction and gender in new world slavery. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Morrissey, M. (1989). Slave women in the new world: Gender stratification in the Caribbean. University Press of Kansas.
Morton, P., Ed. (1996). Discovering the women in slavery: Emancipating perspectives on the American past. University of Georgia Press.
O’Toole, R. (2012). Bound lives: Africans, Indians, and the making of race in colonial Peru. University of Pittsburgh Press.
Offen, K. (2018). Environment, space, and place: Cultural geographies of colonial Afro-Latin America. In A. De la Fuente & G. Andrews (Eds.), Afro-Latin American studies: An introduction (pp. 486–534). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316822883
Orser, C. E. (1988). The archaeological analysis of plantation society: Replacing status and caste with economics and power. American Antiquity, 53(4), 735–751. https://doi.org/10.2307/281116
Orser, C. E. (1994). Toward a global historical archaeology: An example from Brazil. Historical Archaeology, 28(1), 5–22. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03374178
Orser, C. E. (1996). A historical archaeology of the modern world. Plenum Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-8988-1
Otto, J. (1980). Race and class on antebellum plantations. In R. Schuyler (Ed.), Archaeological perspectives on ethnicity in America: Afro-American and Asian American culture history (pp. 3–13). Baywood.
Otto, J. (1984). Cannon’s Point Plantation, 1794–1860: Living conditions and status patterns in the Old South. Academic.
Owsley, D. W., Orser, C. E., Mann, R. W., Moore-Jansen, P. H., & Montgomery, R. L. (1987). Demography and pathology of an urban slave population from New Orleans. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 74, 185–197. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.1330740207
Pereira, J. C. M. S. (2007). À flor da terra: o cemitério dos pretos novos no Rio de Janeiro. Garamond IPHAN.
Premo, B. (2005). Children of the Father King: Youth, authority, and legal minority in colonial Lima. University of North Carolina Press.
Price, D., Tiesler, V., and Burton, J. (2006). Early African diaspora in colonial Campeche, Mexico: Strontium isotopic evidence. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 1–6https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.20390
Proctor, F. T. I. (2019). ‘Alien to my sex’: Enslaved women and their gendered notions of abuse in eighteenth-century Lima. Peru. Journal of Women’s History, 31(2), 57–79. https://doi.org/10.1353/jowh.2019.0014
Rankin-Hill, L. M. (1997). A biohistory of 19th-century Afro-Americans: The burial remains of a Philadelphia cemetery. Bergin & Garvey.
Rathbun, T. A. (1987). Health and disease at a South Carolina plantation: 1840–1870. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 74, 239–253.
Reddock, R. E. (1985). Women slavery in the Caribbean: A feminist perspective. Latin American Perspectives, 12(1), 63–80. https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X8501200104
Reyes Flores, A. (1999). Esclavitud En El Valle de Cañete Siglo XVIII: Haciendas Casablanca Y La Quebrada. Investigaciones Sociales, 26(3), 113–126.
Rodriguez, C. (1996). Anthropology and womanist theory: Claiming the discourse on gender, race, and culture. Womanist Theory and Research, 2(1), 3–11.
Schiebinger, L. (2007). Plants and empire: Colonial bioprospecting in the Atlantic World. Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvk12qdh
Schroeder, H., O’Connell, T. C., Evans, J. A., Shuler, K. A., & Hedges, R. E. (2009). Trans-Atlantic slavery: Isotopic evidence for forced migration to Barbados. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 139(4), 547–557. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.21019
Schroeder, H., O’Connell, T. C., Evans, J. A., Shuler, K. A., & Hedges, R. E. (2015). Genome-wide ancestry of 17th-century enslaved Africans from the Caribbean. PNAS, 112(12), 3669–3673. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1421784112
Schroeder, H., and Shuler, K. A. (2006). Isotopic investigations at newton plantation, Barbados: A progress report. African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter, September.
Shuler, K. A. (2005). Nutritional health of enslaved Africans from Newton Plantation, Barbados: New data. Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society, 166–186.
Smith, B. (Ed.). (1983). Home girls: A Black feminist anthology. Women of Color Press.
Souza, M. A. T. (2016). Behind closed doors: Space, experience, and materiality in the inner areas of Brazilian slave houses. Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage, 5(2), 147–173. https://doi.org/10.1080/21619441.2016.1204793
Trouillot, M. R. (1995). Silencing the past: Power and the production of history. Beacon Press.
Vergne, T. M. (1994). The liberation of women in the Caribbean: Research perspectives for the study of gender relations in the post-emancipation period. Caribbean Studies, 27(1/2), 5–36. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25613234.
Voss, B. (2008). Gender, race, and labor in the archaeology of the Spanish Colonial Americas. Current Anthropology, 49, 861–893. https://doi.org/10.1086/591275
Voss, B. (2008). Domesticating imperialism: Sexual politics and the archaeology of empire. American Anthropologist, 110(2), 191–203. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2008.00025.x
Voss, B. (2015). Narratives of colonialism, grand and not so grand: A critical reflection on the archaeology of the Spanish and Portuguese Americas. In P. P. Funari & M. X. Senatore (Eds.), Archaeology of Culture Contact and Colonialism in Spanish and Portuguese America (pp. 354–361). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08069-7
Walker, A. (1983). In search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist prose. Harcourt.
Warren, A. (2010). Medicine and politics in colonial Peru: Population growth and the Bourbon Reforms. University of Pittsburgh Press.
Weaver, B. (2015). “Fruit of the vines, work of human hands:” An archaeology and ethnohistory of slavery on the Jesuit Wine Haciendas of Nasca, Peru. PhD Dissertation, Vanderbilt University, Nashville.
Weik, T. (1997). The archaeology of maroon societies in the Americas: Resistance, cultural continuity, and transformation in the African Diaspora. Archaeology, 31(2), 81–92. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03373604
Wheaton, T. Jr., Friedlander, A., & Garrow, P. (1983). Yaughan and Curriboo Plantations: Studies in Afro-American archaeology. Archaeological Service Branch, National Park Service.
White, D. G. (1999). Ar’n’t I a woman? Female slaves in the Plantation South. Norton.
Williard, A. M. (2021). Engendering islands: Sexuality, reproduction, and violence in the early French Caribbean. University of Nebraska Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1kz4gfw
Acknowledgements
This study was conducted as part of the Proyecto de Investigación Arqueológica La Quebrada, a community-engaged research program directed by Claire Maass and José Luis Santa Cruz Alcalá. The author would like to thank the members of the Mesa de Trabajo Afroperuana de San Luis and local officials and residents in La Quebrada for their continued support during this project. Pedro Lira, Luis Salazar, Vanessa Salomón, Gonzalo Irureta Salvatierra, Wendy Flores Livia, Ingrid Martinez, Johnny Taira, Maria Luisa Valdivieso, Florentino Zarate, and Renato Flores Sueldo who contributed in excavating and cleaning the archaeological remains discussed in this article. Alex Robert Zuñiga and Gabriela Ore assisted with mapping the archaeological site. Funding for this project was generously provided by the Fulbright US Student Program, the Mellon Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and Stanford University.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Maass, C.K. Race, Gender, and Intersectionality in the Bioarchaeology of the African Diaspora: Perspectives from Colonial Peru. J Archaeol Method Theory 30, 805–827 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-022-09577-3
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-022-09577-3