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African slaves were in New World in 1500s
Graves found near ruins of a colonial church in Mexico

Updated: 2:55 p.m. ET Jan. 31, 2006
WAUSAU, Wis. - Researchers have found the remains of African slaves in a 16th century Mexican graveyard, confirming historical accounts that slavery began in the New World not long after Europeans conquered Mexico, according to a new study.
The graves were discovered near the ruins of a colonial church in Campeche, Mexico, a port city on the Yucatan Peninsula. The authors of the study being released Tuesday say the remains are the earliest physical evidence of slavery in North America.
University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropology professor T. Douglas Price, who helped conduct the study, said the remains confirm historical descriptions of the beginning of slavery in the New World.
“It underscores very vividly that in the Spanish world, slaves were being brought into the colonies right from the very start,” said Matthew Restall, a professor of colonial Latin American history at Penn State University.
Details of the study will be published in an upcoming edition of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
The cemetery and the foundation of the church were uncovered in 2000 by construction workers digging around Campeche’s central park. The site was then excavated under the direction of the Autonomous University of the Yucatan.
Archaeologists found fragmented remains of four Africans who were likely young to middle-age men, Price said.
Researchers identified the slave remains by looking for a chemical in tooth enamel linked to the bedrock of their native Africa. Some teeth also had a distinctive mutilation recognized as a decorative practice common among Africans.
The remains dated from the late 1500s to the mid-1600s. Archaeological and historical evidence suggested the graveyard was used from about 1550 to the late 1600s, Price said.
“Part of what is surprising and interesting about this is where the bones are. They are right in the middle of the city,” Restall said.
That means African slaves were given Christian burials on hallowed ground within the city walls but separate from the Spaniards. Such practices contrasted sharply with the way slaves were treated on plantations farther north, he said.
“I think it is particularly interesting because you have African slaves from Africa, you have Europeans from Spain and you have Maya Indians who were in this region initially all together in this church cemetery,” Price said.
Early in their rule, the Spanish enslaved Indians to perform heavy labor but turned to African slaves as European diseases decimated native populations, researchers said.

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World Leaders Mark Auschwitz Liberation

Jan 27, 11:29 AM (ET)

By VANESSA GERA

BRZEZINKA, Poland (AP) - As candles flickered in the snowy, winter gloom, world leaders and Auschwitz survivors Thursday remembered victims of the Holocaust on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp.

The ceremony, which opened with the recorded rumble of an approaching train, was held on the spot where new arrivals were brought in by rail to the vast camp and put through "selection" - meaning those few who were deemed able to work were separated from the rest who were taken immediately to the gas chambers.

"It seems if you listen hard enough, you can still hear the outcry of horror of the murdered people," Israeli President Moshe Katsav said. "When I walk the ground of the concentration camps, I fear that I am walking on the ashes of the victims."

Joining in the commemoration were Vice President Dick Cheney, and presidents Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland, Vladimir Putin of Russia, and Jacques Chirac of France. German President Horst Koehler sat on the platform without speaking in recognition of his country's responsibility for the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews died during World War II.

Barbed wire and brick barracks stretched as far as the eye could see. The ruined crematoriums loomed nearby, all covered with a layer of fresh snow.

Girl Scouts brought blankets to elderly survivors sitting in the freezing cold.

"For a former inmate of Auschwitz, it is an unimaginable and overwhelming emotion to be able to speak in this cemetery without graves, the largest one in the history of Europe," said Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, a survivor who later became Poland's foreign minister.

When he arrived in 1940, he recalled, "I never imagined I would outlive Hitler or survive World War II."

Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz and the neighboring camp at Birkenau, or Brzezinka in Polish, on Jan. 27, 1945. Some 1.5 million people, most of them Jews, had died at the two camps from gassing, starvation, exhaustion, beatings and disease.

Other victims included Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, Gypsies, homosexuals and political opponents of the Nazis.

"We think of the suffering of our brothers, of the special ties that link us, Poles, with the Jewish nation," Kwasniewski said.

Putin compared the Nazis with the terrorists of today.

"Today we shall not only remember the past but also be aware of all the threats of the modern world," he said. "Terrorism is among them, and it is no less dangerous and cunning than fascism."

The leaders placed candles, in blue glass holders, at a memorial as they left. New Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko made the sign of the cross after gently setting his down.

Earlier in Krakow, Cheney noted that the Holocaust did not happen in some far-off place but "in the heart of the civilized world."

"The story of the camps shows that evil is real and must be called by its name and must be confronted," he said.

Putin won long applause when he acknowledged that anti-Semitism and xenophobia had surfaced in Russia, tackling an issue that the Kremlin had long failed to confront directly. Putin said many in the world should be ashamed of new manifestations of anti-Semitism six decades after the defeat of fascism.

"Even in our country, in Russia, which did more than any to combat fascism ... we sometimes unfortunately see manifestations of this problem and I, too, am ashamed of that," Putin said.

Survivor Franciszek Jozefiak, 80, said efforts to educate new generations about the Holocaust should be strengthened.

"Today I'm remembering my father, gassed here. I'm remembering the atrocious things they did to us here," said Jozefiak, who is from Krakow. "I drank water from a dirty pool and, to punish me, an SS man jumped on my arm and broke it and jumped on my chest and broke two ribs."

One day, he said, the Nazi guards lined them up and told some to go right, others left. He went left and his father went right and was taken to the gas chamber.

"The message today is: No more Auschwitz," Jozefiak said. "But the world has learned nothing so far - you see they are fighting and killing each other everywhere in the world.

"Today they are saying a lot because of the anniversary, but tomorrow they will forget," he warned.

Earlier, at a youth forum in Krakow, participants applauded several surviving Soviet soldiers awarded for liberating the camp, and saw a video message from 92-year-old Maj. Anatoly Shapiro, who commanded the Soviet unit that captured Auschwitz. He was too sick to travel from his home in New York.

"I would like to say to all the people on the earth: Unite, and do not permit this evil that was committed," Shapiro said in the recorded greeting. "This should never be repeated, ever."

In Brussels, members of the European Parliament stood in a minute of silence to mark the anniversary.

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Cheney Says Holocaust Is Reminder of Evil

Jan 27, 3:55 PM (ET)

By DEB RIECHMANN

OSWIECIM, Poland (AP) - Vice President Dick Cheney stood Thursday with Nazi death camp survivors - some with their prison numbers pinned to their coats - and said the world was "bound by conscience to remember" the horror of the Holocaust.

Just yards from the ruins of the crematoria, Cheney listened as dignitaries, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, marked the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps.

"The story of the camps reminds us that evil is real and must be called by its name and must be confronted," Cheney said at a forum in Krakow before traveling to the camps. "We are reminded that anti-Semitism may begin with words but rarely stops with words and the message of intolerance and hatred must be opposed before it turns into acts of horror."

The Soviet Army freed prisoners at the camps on Jan. 27, 1945, as the war neared its end. Between 1 million and 1.5 million prisoners - most of them Jews - perished in gas chambers or died of starvation and disease at Auschwitz and Birkenau. Overall, 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.

Cheney quoted President Bush, who said, "We are bound by conscience to remember what happened and to whom it happened."

While he didn't draw the comparison directly, the subtext of Cheney's message melded with the theme of Bush's Inauguration Day speech about freedom versus tyranny as well as one of his previous State of the Union addresses, in which he called Iraq, North Korea and Iran the "axis of evil."

Putin more directly linked the Holocaust with terrorism today.

"We shall not only remember the past but also be aware of all the threats of the modern world," Putin said at the liberation celebration, held outside in blowing snow and freezing temperatures. "Terrorism is among them and it is no less dangerous and cunning than fascism. And it is equally cruel. It has already claimed thousands of innocent lives."

For more than three hours, Holocaust survivors listened to solemn speeches and prayers while huddled under coats and blankets. In some cases, their eyes and cheeks were the only flesh exposed to the wind and cold. Cheney, wearing a heavy olive parka with a white fur-edged hood, sat between his wife, Lynne, and Israel's president, Moshe Katsav.

In his remarks, given in Hebrew, Katsav said, "It seems as if we can still hear the dead crying out."

The ceremony began with a recording of an approaching train, a sound that created mental images of crowded railroad cars bringing new prisoners to the camps. It ended with long ribbons of fire set ablaze on a stretch of railroad tracks that had carried hundreds of thousands to their eventual graves.

"On this day in 1945, inside a prison for the innocent, liberators arrived and looked into the faces of thousands near death - while miles beyond the camp, many thousands more were being led on a death march in the winter cold," Cheney said in his remarks in Krakow earlier in the day.

"Inside barbed wire and behind high walls, soldiers found baths that were not baths, hospitals meant not to heal but to kill and the belongings of hundreds of thousands who had vanished."

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