Imagine flying, impossibly, over the Earth in the
17th century—during the time described in American history books as the
colonial period, when Europeans swarmed into the New World to dominate
an almost empty wilderness. Instead, you would see tens of millions of
native people already living in the Americas, joined by an extraordinary
flow not of European colonists but of African slaves. Up until the
early 19th century, almost four times as many Africans as Europeans came
to the Americas. Looking down from above, you wouldn’t know that the
tiny numbers of Europeans were supposed to be the stars of the story.
Rather, your attention would focus on the two majority populations:
Africans and Indians.
You’d have a lot to watch. By the tens of thousands, African slaves
escaped the harsh conditions of the European plantations and mining
operations and headed for the interior, into lands controlled by
Indians. Up and down the Americas, ex-slaves and indigenous peoples
fashioned hybrid settlements known as maroon communities, after the
Spanish cimarrón, or runaway.
Largely conducted out of sight of Europeans, the complex interplay
between black and red is a hidden drama that historians and
archaeologists have only recently begun to unravel. Nowhere is the
presence of this lost chapter more in evidence than... READ MORE HERE...
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/04/maroon-people/mann-hecht-text
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