Priscilla's Coming Home!!!

 

Priscilla: The story of an African slave

By Leslie Goffe  BBC News, New York Using a rare and unbroken document trail, scholars have succeeded in tracing a 10-year old girl from her kidnap in Sierra Leone 249 years ago to her life on the plantation in the United States where she was taken, forced into slavery, and re-named Priscilla. Thomalind Polite travelled to Sierra Leone, where her ancestor was kidnapped Most amazing of all though, researchers have identified one of Priscilla's modern day descendants, great-great-great-great-great granddaughter, Thomalind Martin Polite, 31, who lives in South Carolina, not far from the plantation where her ancestor was a slave.

Priscilla's extraordinary story is featured in a major exhibition currently showing at the New York Historical Society, Finding Priscilla's Children: The Roots and Branches of Slavery, which can be seen until 5 March, 2006. Earlier this year, Priscilla's descendant, Thomalind, a speech therapist, made an extraordinary "homecoming" journey to Sierra Leone at the invitation of that country's government. She met President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah and other top national leaders, and was given an African name in a moving seaside ceremony. Sierra Leone's most popular music group wrote a song in Ms Polite's honour: "Rush with the message, go tell it to the people, open the gates, Priscilla's coming home."

 Cont:
 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4460964.stm

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Humans in the Americas 50,000 years ago?

That is one of the theories to be explored tomorrow night on Time Team America. Check your local PBS listings.

THE TOPPER SITE

In 1998, archaeologists from the Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of South Carolina, while excavating a prehistoric site on the Savannah river in Allendale County, SC, discovered stone implements far deeper in the ground than they had ever encountered before. Subsequent excavations and studies have revealed that ancient humans were present 16,000 or more years ago, some two to three thousand years earlier than previously allowed by textbooks. Known as the Topper Site, it appears to be one of several sites in the eastern U.S. producing evidence that humans were living in the western hemisphere during the last Ice Age.

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On July 15th, 2009, Time Team America visits one of the most controversial sites in North America: the Topper site, which is believed by its excavator to contain a 20,000-50,000 year old preclovis site.

Read the review

Waters, Michael R., Steven L. Forman, Thomas W. Stafford Jr., and John Foss 2009 Geoarchaeological Investigations at the Topper and Big Pine Sites, Allendale County, Central Savannah River, South Carolina. Journal of Archaeological Science 36(7):1300-1311. As far as I'm aware, this is the only peer-reviewed paper on Topper published to date. It details the stratigraphy and presents a suite of AMS and thermoluminescence dates for it; but concludes that the human origin of the "smashed core and microliths" preclovis occupation has not been proven.

• Time Team America: Topper site, at PBS where you can watch the video in its entirety after July 15,2009
• Topper: The Allendale Expedition, official homepage of the Topper site
• David Anderson and Michael Faught's map "Paleoindian Database of the Americas"
• Why 50,000 is a Crazy Date for Topper, which explains the hurdles the Topper site needs to scale to be accepted.
• Clovis Culture, a description of the sites and living style
• PreClovis Culture, the evidence and (generally) accepted sites
• Clovis, Black Mats, and Extraterrestrials, the theory about a cometary explosion over the Canadian ice sheet

Populating America: Four Theories

• Clovis and the Ice Free Corridor
• Preclovis and the Pacific Coast Migration
• Solutrean Precursors to Clovis
• Trans-Pacific Contacts

http://archaeology.about.com/od/currentevents/ss/time_team_america_3.htm

http://www.pbs.org/opb/timeteam/

© History Chasers

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Hurricanes on the Eastern Seaboard were much worse 5,000 years ago

We hear that hurricanes are growing worse, but that idea does not hold up under scrutiny. In fact a new technique is showing just the opposite. One can only imagine the horrors visited upon the Indians living there at the time.

According to this book; Hurricanes and Typhoons: Past, Present, and Future
by Richard J. Murnane (Editor), Kam-biu Liu (Editor)

"Paleotempestology is an emerging field of science that studies past tropical cyclone activity mainly through the use of geological proxy techniques..."

A study of the past 5,000 years reveals the past 1.000 years to have been relatively quiet.

http://www.amazon.com/reader/0231123884?_encoding=UTF8&ref_=sib_sip_pdp_pg&query=hurricane%20history#reader

http://www.amazon.com/reader/0231123884?_encoding=UTF8&ref_=sib_sip_pdp_pg&query=hurricane%20history#reader


© History Chasers

Click here to view all recent Searching for the Lost Colony DNA Blog posts

Barbados: South Carolina's Mother Colony

When most of us were in elementary school, we learned about the English settlement at Jamestown and the Pilgrims' landing at Plymouth Rock. It seemed that all 13 American colonies were settled by people who sailed directly from the British Isles or continental Europe.

But one colony was different. Many of South Carolina's early settlers – and an even higher proportion of its leaders – came from the English colony of Barbados.

Barbados is the most eastern island in the West Indies. It lies off the northeastern coast of South America and is sandwiched between the Atlantic Ocean on its east and the Caribbean Sea on its west. At 166 square miles, Barbados is less than half the size of South Carolina's smallest county, McCormick.

British colonists first arrived in Barbados in 1627, and by 1645 there were 11,200 farms and plantations on the island. In just 18 years sugarcane had become an extraordinarily profitable crop, but one that required lots of land and slave labor.

Land, of course, was limited on Barbados, and many planters decided to sell their property and invest in the newly formed colony of Carolina, where land and the opportunities it provided seemed unlimited.
continue on SCIway

Can DNA Solve "The Lumbee Problem"?

How does a group of people who have American Indian ancestry but no records of treaties, reservations, Native language, or peculiarly "Indian" customs come to be accepted--socially and legally--as Indians?That question is asked on the jacket of the 2001 printing of The Lumbee Problem--The Making of an American Indian People by anthropologist Karen I. Blu (University of Nebraska Press, 2001; copyright 1980, Karen I. Blu). And that's just the surface of "the Lumbee problem."

Suppose Scots-Irish settlers in North Carolina in the early eighteenth century came upon a group of people who in some ways seemed to be indigenous, but spoke seventeenth century English and had English names. History or an episode of the Twilight Zone?

Indeed, this seems to be the history of the Lumbee Indians of North Carolina. But who are they really? Are they Indians? What is their origin?

A prominent theory is that the Lumbees are descendants of Native Americans and survivors of the Lost Colony of North Carolina.

In 1587, a group of colonists under Sir Walter Raleigh's charter landed in the Outer Banks of what is now North Carolina. This was the second or third group of colonists in the area. One group had returned to England with Sir Francis Drake. The latter group was headed by Governor John White. White returned to England to re-supply the colony; his voyage back to America was delayed by the complications of the English war with Spain and the winter weather. When White did return in 1590, the colonist were gone, but strange "clues" were found. The word "Croatan" was found carved in the wall of a structure that had been built by the colonists. The colonists were never found.

In the early 1700's, Scots-Irish settlers came upon English-speaking people in the interior of southeastern North Carolina. These people appeared to be of mixed race. It is said that in the early censuses, these people were enumerated as "mulattoes" or "free Negroes." The people themselves claimed to be Indians. They waged a legal and political struggle in t he nineteenth century for recognition as Indians.


http://geneablogie.blogspot.com/2007/10/can-dna-solve-lumbee-problem.html