Britain's abolition of the slave trade in 1807 did not end the traffic
of human beings across the Atlantic. Indeed, for many decades to come,
hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans continued to be shipped into
slavery. From 1840 to 1872 the remote South Atlantic island of St Helena
played a pivotal role in Britain's efforts to suppress the slave trade,
and over this time it received over 25,000 'liberated Africans', taken
from slave ships by Royal Navy patrols. Conditions aboard the slavers
were appalling, and many did not survive the journey. Rupert's Valley
therefore became a graveyard to many thousands of Africans - 'a valley
of dry bones' in the words of a visiting missionary. In 2008
archaeological excavations uncovered a small part of that graveyard,
revealing the burials of over 300 victims of the slave trade. It was
disposal on a massive scale, with the dead interred in a combination of
single, multiple and mass graves. This book presents the finding of the
archaeological and osteological study, and in so doing brings the
inhumanity of the slave trade into vivid focus. It tells the story of a
group of children and young adults who had lived in Africa only a few
weeks prior to their death on St Helena, and whose remains bear witness
to the cruelty of their transportation. However, the archaeology also
shows them as more than just victims, but also as individuals with a
sense of their own identity and culture. The slave trade continues to
this day, and although this book is a study of the past it also serves
as a reminder of evils that persist into the modern day.
