Here be dragons: the untapped archaeological potential of São Tomé and Príncipe

ABSTRACT

Africa has thus far contributed little to debates in the field of island archaeology. This paper explores the potential of São Tomé and Príncipe, a small island state in the Gulf of Guinea that may be the only country in the world where no archaeological fieldwork has yet been undertaken. This contrasts sharply with its importance as a focal point in the development of plantation economies based on unfree labour, campaigns of resistance to these, the transfer of crops between the Old and New Worlds, and the emergence of new, creolized societies, as well as with its enmeshment in systems of international trade and exploitation foundational to global capitalism. This paper discusses the contributions that archaeological research in the archipelago could make to these and other themes, including the environmental impacts of human settlement, and identifies parallels with work on islands in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean.

KEYWORDS:

• Island archaeology
• São Tomé and Príncipe
• colonization
• environmental impact
• Columbian exchange
• plantations
• slavery
• indentured labour
• archaeology of the contemporary world

Introduction

Island archaeology uses insular settings to explore in more bounded and thus more manageable terms the histories of human societies and their impacts on what are frequently sensitive ecologies (DiNapoli and Leppard 2018). No longer viewing islands as tightly bounded ‘laboratories’ (Eriksen 1993), it tackles these themes without assuming that insularity implies isolation, making interactions between island populations and island and mainland communities another of its core components (Fitzpatrick, Rick, and Erlandson 2015). However, it remains dominated by case-studies from the Mediterranean, the Pacific, and the Caribbean. African islands rarely feature (Mitchell 2004), and little of the research undertaken on them explicitly references wider island archaeology debates (though see, for example, Crowther et al. 2016).

To help repair these omissions we discuss here the unexplored potential of the West African island state of São Tomé and Príncipe, perhaps the only country in the world where precisely no archaeological fieldwork has yet been carried out. Its rich and complex history and significance for biodiversity conservation make it an ideal candidate for illustrating why African islands merit greater archaeological attention. We begin by introducing the islands and their history, noting their importance in Portuguese exploration south along Africa’s Atlantic coast, the establishment of plantation-based economies driven by unfree labour, the production of cash crops (sugar, coffee, and cacao) valued for their ability to create new, essential tastes for those consuming them (e.g. Mintz 1987), the emergence of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the formation of creolized societies, and the trans-oceanic transfer of crops central to the Columbian Exchange (Seibert 2013; Thornton 2012). Along with people’s impact on São Tomé and Príncipe’s unique ecologies, these topics frame much of our subsequent discussion. Crucially, however, we also consider how approaches informed by the archaeology of the contemporary world may help understand the islands’ more recent history, including the transformation of plantation life following independence from Portugal in 1975 and the ways through which the material legacies of that economy still structure contemporary livelihoods.

São Tomé and Príncipe: geography and history

Separated by some 140 km of open water, São Tomé and Príncipe form part of a volcanic chain, the Cameroon Line that extends across the Gulf of Guinea and onto the African mainland (Figure 1). Together, they cover 1001 km² and have about 214,000 inhabitants, making them the second smallest African state (after Seychelles) and the smallest independent Portuguese-speaking territory in the world. Although no longer volcanically active, both islands are heavily mountainous and share a similar tropical climate. Lying almost on the Equator, temperature varies little, but rainfall is concentrated between October and May. São Tomé is by far the larger island (859 km²) with >96% of the country’s population, but Príncipe retains autonomy within what has been a multi-party democracy since 1990. Most people survive on subsistence agriculture and fishing, but much food is imported (with cacao the principal export), tourism limited, and petroleum reserves still unexploited. A low per capita GDP (~US$4000) belies a higher Human Development Index than all but seven Sub-Saharan countries (CIA 2021).

Figure 1. Map of São Tomé and Príncipe showing its location within the Gulf of Guinea and the locations of places mentioned in the text.

São Tomé takes its name from the date (21 December, the feast of St Thomas) of its discovery in 1471 by Portuguese explorers seeking opportunities for trade and a route around Africa to the Indies. Príncipe was encountered early the following year (Seibert 2013). The islands gained strategic relevance because of their potential for growing food to supply Portugal’s ships and the fort established in 1482 at Elmina on the coast of Ghana. That they were well-suited to cultivating sugarcane was quickly noted, but only in 1493 did attempts at settlement succeed, first on São Tomé and then – from around 1500 – also on Príncipe. The tropical climate, a dearth of readily available foodstuffs, difficulties in growing crops of European origin, disease (notably malaria and yellow fever), and limited manpower all hampered colonization, with Jewish deportees and convicted criminals favoured in early attempts to boost settler numbers (Caldeira 2011). Of greater consequence was the importation of thousands of slaves from mainland Africa, initially from the kingdom of Benin (modern Nigeria), quickly followed by others from Kongo (northern Angola and the mouth of the Congo River), making São Tomé and Príncipe the first plantation economy in the tropics and providing the basis for the growth of cultural and linguistic traditions of mixed European and African origin, especially given official encouragement of mixed unions and the participation of freed slaves and people of mixed descent in political and economic life (Seibert 2013).

Fuelled by slave labour, sugar became the mainstay of the islands’ economy. Grown on dozens of estates (engenhos), output increased quickly, especially after water-powered mills were introduced. By 1550, São Tomé had outstripped Madeira, another Portuguese colony, as the world’s leading producer, peaking at around 200,000 arrobas (~3000 tonnes) in 1580 (Godinho 1983). Enslaved Africans were crucial to this as they coped better with the climate, were partly resistant to tropical diseases, and knew how to grow crops like yams for subsistence purposes. But slaves were also exported, sent to Elmina as porters on trading expeditions into the interior, in larger numbers to Portugal and, from 1525, to the Spanish Caribbean and ultimately Brazil. Already a slave society before the trans-Atlantic trade began (Seibert 2013, 55), São Tomé and Príncipe became a crucial node in those networks through the sixteenth century as both importer and re-exporter until eclipsed by competition from Portuguese slavers in Angola and newly arriving Dutch and English traders. Sugar also declined from the late 1500s, though its quality (as opposed to its quantity) had never been high. Local political instability, multiple slave revolts, drought, Dutch attacks during Portugal’s union with Spain from 1580 to 1648, and growing competition from Brazil (to which many planters emigrated) collectively saw São Tomé lose out in international trade, with commercial production ceasing almost entirely by 1700. What had always been a tiny European population also largely disappeared. Governance shifted into the hands of filhos de terra (free people of mixed European/African descent) and forros (free Africans), while the economy emphasized the islanders’ subsistence needs and those of ships engaged in trans-Atlantic trade.

Coffee’s introduction as a cash crop in 1787, followed by cacao around 1820, therefore effectively saw Portugal colonize the islands afresh. This involved establishing tighter administrative control and the eventual creation of an archipelago-wide system of largely self-sufficient plantations (roças) that have been described as ‘authentic micro-cities’, often with their own hospitals, schools, chapels, railways, and harbours (Da Silva and Fernandez 2012, 144). By the early 1900s, when the islands were the world’s largest cocoa producer, the roças were almost entirely owned by absentee landlords or Portuguese companies (Kiesow 2017; Seibert 2013). Like sugar in the sixteenth century, coffee and cacao initially depended on an enslaved workforce, but after slavery’s abolition in 1875 ex-slaves were reluctant to work on the plantations. Notwithstanding the international scandal that erupted just before the First World War over how they were sourced and the conditions in which they worked (Higgs 2012), the solution was to employ notionally paid, but in practice more-or-less forcibly recruited, labourers who came mostly from Cape Verde (in the case of Príncipe) or Angola and Mozambique (in that of São Tomé). Only with independence and the nationalization of the roças did this system finally end. Agrarian reforms subsequently saw many contract labourers (tongas) obtain land titles, with some estates later redeveloped as ecotourism destinations.

Heritage infrastructure

Academic interest in São Tomé and Príncipe’s cultural heritage took shape during the Estado Novo, the authoritarian regime that governed Portugal from 1933 to 1974. The decree of 1958 mandating the classification, conservation, and repair of monuments in Portugal’s overseas colonies followed a reconnaissance visit to the islands by the director of the National Monuments Service, Luís Benavente, who identified two churches and two forts, all in São Tomé city, as priorities for restoration. His focus was exclusively on monuments of Portuguese power dating to the islands’ initial period of prosperity in the sixteenth/early seventeenth centuries and nothing substantive was achieved by way of building heritage capacity locally (Mariz 2012). Establishing a national museum was thus a post-independence initiative, located in one of those restored monuments, Fort São Sebastião, which was built in 1566–1575 as a defence against other European powers and slave uprisings (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Fort São Sebastião, São Tomé, from the landward side.

Although one of the archipelago’s oldest buildings, São Sebastião’s own history is absent from the mixed historical/ethnographic narrative that it offers visitors. More surprising perhaps is the lack of sustained engagement with the histories of slavery, the forced labour system that replaced it, and the resistance to both (Sarmento 2013). Their importance is duly acknowledged in publications relating to UNESCO’s Slave Route Project (e.g. Henriques 2013), but studies of cultural heritage that might hold archaeological potential have been limited to investigations undertaken via architecture faculties at Portuguese universities. These include an exploration of the early urban evolution of São Tomé city (Da Silva 2012) which, among other things, attempted to pinpoint the locations of the captain’s tower constructed in 1493 as the archipelago’s first seat of government and other key civic and religious buildings (a storehouse for sugar exports; slave barracks; the municipal chamber, etc.). However, the principal emphasis of these investigations has been on restoring the islands’ roças because of their significance as ‘laboratories in cultural experimentation’ and ‘the basis for structuring the physical and human landscape’ and their role in ‘the materialization of an extensive memory that not only encompasses the colonizing project, but principally all the means and relationships mobilized in its implementation and subsequent appropriation and readaptation’ (Fernandes, de Sá, and Póvoas 2012a, 157, our translation). Roças of specific historical importance (Água Izé, São Tomé’s first major cacao plantation; Courela 2019; Fernandes 2018) or monumental scale (Agostinho Neto, previously Rio do Ouro; Quaresma 2019), plus others linked to major ecotourism ventures (e.g. Sundy; Carvalho 2020), have been singled out for attention in projects focused on halting their physical decay and adapting them to the residential and economic needs of those living there today (Figure 3).

Figure 3. The mock-medieval stable façade at Roça Sundy, Príncipe.

None of these efforts at heritage commemoration, conservation, and valorization have considered whether the buildings at their heart might also be appropriate for archaeological investigation. Nor do they acknowledge how archaeology’s emphasis on interrogating all forms of past material culture might open up avenues of investigation that could differ from, or openly challenge, the narratives set by written history and a built heritage centred around the priorities of estate owners. In this, these architectural programs thus replicate the omission of archaeological work when São Sebastião was first restored and later converted into a museum. Several reasons can be advanced for this. First, while recognizing the importance of cultural heritage in nation-building in a 2003 law (Abreu de Castaño 2012, 47–50), São Tomé and Príncipe is an island micro-state with few resources and many development priorities arguably more pressing than archaeology. Second, its brief settlement history, small size, and relatively difficult-to-reach (from the Global North) location have pushed it to the margins of archaeological consciousness, a location exacerbated by two further factors: its official language is (and thus most relevant historical documents are in) Portuguese, not English or French, African archaeology’s two dominant languages; and even Lusophone archaeologists have, until recently, shown little interest in islands that today remain part of Portugal (Madeira, the Azores; Sousa 2006, 2011), let alone the historical archaeology of more distant colonies. That pioneering investigations of colonial churches and other buildings in Cape Verde were led from the University of Cambridge is a case in point (Sørenson, Evans, and Richter 2011). Disciplinary divides and lack of awareness among those teaching and researching architectural history and restoration of archaeology’s potential contribution may also be relevant.

São Tomé and Príncipe and the archaeology of islands

Island archaeology addresses many themes: island colonization; the historical ecology of islands and human impacts on island ecosystems; variation in cultural contacts, connectivity, interaction, and insularity; histories of enslavement, indentured labour, and resistance; the emergence of distinctive island societies; and the continuing role of the past in the present, including the conservation and management of heritage sites. We now discuss how these topics might be explored on São Tomé and Príncipe.

Colonization

Despite beliefs now widely held on São Tomé itself (Seibert 2015), there is no documentary or material evidence for the archipelago having been inhabited before 1471, something unsurprising given its distance from the African mainland (>200 km) and the limited seafaring and navigational capacity of Atlantic African populations compared, say, to their counterparts on the continent’s eastern seaboard. In principle, it ought therefore to be possible to combine historical sources with surveys for surviving artefact concentrations to map the expansion of human settlement across the islands and explore the factors affecting this. Elevated and broken terrain, for example, plainly encouraged sugar estates, like the later roças, to concentrate in lower-lying areas, such as the north of São Tomé, that also gave ready access to the coast. The islands’ mountainous interiors, on the other hand remained principally attractive to those escaping enslavement, a pattern paralleled on Réunion in the western Indian Ocean (Eve 2003). However, unlike the Mascarene Archipelago (Cheke and Hume 2008), there is no sign of the Portuguese attempting to ‘seed’ São Tomé and Príncipe with livestock or plants of European origin before trying to settle there. The impossibility of growing wheat, vines, and olives in a tropical climate meant that food security was thus a pressing concern for early settlers, motivating them to import skilled (particularly female) enslaved labour from mainland Africa to make it possible to successfully grow the tropical-adapted African crops required for the subsequent establishment of a viable plantation economy (Caldeira 2011). More generally, the insecurities of setting up a colony in a strange, hostile, distant environment may, along with genuine conviction, have encouraged the heavy emphasis on religious construction that marked the early years of settlement (at least five churches and a monastery for just 250 households in the São Tomé city of the early 1500s; Da Silva 2012, 52–54).

São Tomé and Príncipe’s history is thus unusual in terms of the global pattern of island colonizations, almost all of which were effected in prehistory (Gamble 2013). Bermuda, the Falklands, and the islands of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge (including St Helena, the Azores, and Iceland) apart, the few exceptions share with São Tomé and Príncipe proximity to Africa, an absence of human inhabitation before European discovery, and the introduction of enslaved labourers to work in a plantation economy, leading, in almost every instance, to the subsequent development of new, creolized societies (see below). In the case of Madeira, Cape Verde, and Annobón (which lies to the south of São Tomé, but still within the Gulf of Guinea) similarities are heightened by the fact that all three were colonized in the 1400s by Portuguese settlers with a common political, social, economic, and ideological background, reinforced by hundreds of years of shared history thereafter. While historians (e.g. Ribeiro da Silva 2014; Santana Pérez 2018) have explored how such commonalities shaped the islands’ relations with their European metropole and their shifting strategic importance, archaeologists have yet to engage systematically in comparable studies, whether within the Portuguese Atlantic or more broadly across the African Atlantic as a whole or between its islands and their Indian Ocean counterparts in Mauritius, Réunion, and Seychelles. Archaeological research on São Tomé and Príncipe thus has scope to contribute to studies of island colonization at multiple geographical scales, up to and including those encompassing instances (largely in the Caribbean) where European settlement imposed plantation economies powered by enslaved Africans on islands that had been previously inhabited (see Armstrong 2013).

Human impacts and palaeoenvironmental change

On São Tomé and Príncipe, like many of the other tropical islands just mentioned, cultivation of crops for subsistence and for export required clearance of the extensive, dense primary forest that probably covered much of both islands in the late fifteenth century. The need for firewood for domestic use and to process the sugarcane grown as a cash crop exacerbated deforestation. Exact figures are impossible to ascertain, but by 1540 ‘great clearings’ had already replaced much of São Tomé’s original ‘forest of tall, straight, very green trees of various kinds, reaching up to the sky’ (Blake 1942, 156). Historical records indicate that secondary forest regrew as sugar declined post-1580 (Caldeira 2017) and continued to do so in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Da Silva and Fernandez 2012, 143). Subsequently, however, the re-establishment of large-scale plantations for growing coffee and cacao reversed this trend, producing a further wave of deforestation that continues today (Macedo 2019). Why does this matter?

The answer lies in the fact that São Tomé and Príncipe’s antiquity as islands and their distance from Africa have produced globally significant levels of biological endemism. Of 45 resident bird species, for example, 17 are wholly endemic, three more occur only on São Tomé, Príncipe, and Annobón (Figure 1), and a further eight are represented by endemic subspecies (De Lima et al. 2013). Ongoing forest loss particularly threatens endemic taxa, but the islands completely lack any kind of palaeoenvironmental record for measuring change since human settlement began or for ascertaining how far native ecologies and species ‘rebounded’ in the interval between sugar and coffee/cacao. Equally unknown are the consequences of introducing domestic livestock (notably pigs) and human commensals – principally cats, rats, and mona monkeys (Cercopithecus mona) – although experience on other tropical islands makes it unlikely that they have been negligible (Braje et al. 2017; Dutton 1994). Archaeological fieldwork on São Tomé and Príncipe that included palaeoenvironmental studies (for example, pollen and sedimentological studies at suitable wetland locations) might thus begin to quantify how far current conservation efforts operate in a humanly transformed landscape (cf. Castilla-Beltrán et al. 2019 for Cape Verde or De Boer et al. 2013 for Mauritius).

Connectivity and insularity

Non-native cash crops have been central to Santomean history, but the islands also witnessed the introduction of many other exotics, including citrus and other fruits from Europe and plantain/banana (Musa sp.), most likely from the kingdom of Kongo (Alpern 1992). As a key node in the evolving Atlantic system, São Tomé and Príncipe’s geographical position and early involvement in sugar production and the trans-Atlantic slave trade also made it a major axis for introducing New World crops to West and Central Africa. Maize (Zea mays), manioc (Manihot esculenta), sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas), and pineapple (Ananas comosus) – complemented by coconuts (Cocos nucifera) and ginger (Zingiber officinale) among taxa of Indian Ocean origin – were all grown there in the sixteenth century, before being conveyed to the mainland, where Elmina was an important point of entry (Alpern 1992). These are, of course, but a few of the several hundred plants introduced to Africa as part of the Columbian Exchange (Gallagher 2016), and São Tomé and Príncipe likely played a role in many of those transfers too. However, maize and manioc (cassava) were particularly significant in boosting subsistence outputs, promoting population growth, and encouraging changing patterns of labour and gender relations (Mitchell 2005, 198–201).

While these botanical connections may be difficult to track archaeologically because of preservation problems in tropical environments (though phytoliths, for example, have potential), other connections may be easier to discern. Consider, for instance, how archaeological excavations might help identify the involvement of island populations in exchanges of technology and objects, their ability to access items drawn from afar, and the emphasis they may have placed on maintaining, or altering, styles of life familiar back in Portugal. Fieldwork in the historic cores of São Tomé city and São António – the capital of Príncipe – might be particularly productive here if it were possible. On Madeira, for example, archaeological finds have not only documented the material culture of daily life, a theme largely missing from historical sources, but also demonstrated people’s ability to access ceramics, glassware, tobacco pipes, and foodstuffs from across the Portuguese empire and even beyond (Sousa 2006, 2011). A similar emphasis on seeking to ‘maintain a similarity in daily life routines’ by using what had been familiar at home is evident in Cape Verde (Abulafia 2019, 492). Particularly in the Santomean context, however, where European settlers were few and the free population rapidly became dominated by individuals of African or Euro-African descent keen to enhance their own status, archaeology may also show how material culture was employed to contest and advance social positions (cf. González-Ruibal 2015). These points hold true as much for the archipelago’s recolonization in the nineteenth/twentieth centuries as for its initial sixteenth-century settlement and the period between. Choices in ceramics and glassware, complemented where possible by faunal analyses and residue studies, could extend such investigations beyond material culture per se to encompass changes in foodways as well (cf. Abrahams-Willis 1998; Pavao-Zuckerman and DiPaolo Loren 2012).

A further instance of São Tomé and Príncipe’s enmeshment with wider global networks is also worth briefly noting, namely its selection as one of two locations at which astronomers observed the total solar eclipse of 29 May 1919, the longest in over 500 years. Led by Sir Arthur Eddington, the expedition to Príncipe based itself at the Sundy plantation where it is now commemorated by several plaques (Latas, Pape, and Simões 2020; Weszkalnys 2009). Its success in measuring the gravitational deflection of starlight passing near the Sun provided the first confirmation of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity (Coles 2019). That Príncipe was one of the few readily accessible locations at which to undertake the experiment¹ neatly underlines how from the very beginning of its settlement by people the archipelago, despite being insular, has never been isolated.

Archaeologies of plantation slavery, resistance, and creolization

Like the subsequent cultivation of coffee and cacao, growing sugarcane on São Tomé and Príncipe, depended on a large workforce able to cope with the islands’ tropical climate and the disease challenges that this hosted. Lacking sufficient European settlers, or an exploitable indigenous population like the Canary Islands (Tejera Gaspar and Aznar Vallejo 1992), labour was sourced in unfree form from Africa, not least because the archipelago’s distance from the mainland effectively precluded possibilities of escape. The clear parallels with systems run on the backs of enslaved labour in the Caribbean (and wider Americas) or the western Indian Ocean and its historical primacy as the first tropical plantation colony should allow São Tomé and Príncipe to make a West African contribution to debates on how plantation societies operated, new forms of society evolved as people of different origins mixed and intermarried, and enslavement was resisted and fought.

In the first place, work could emphasize locating traces of the plantation system’s material infrastructure and organization, the buildings and facilities that producing sugar, coffee, or cacao demanded, and the artefacts and structures with – and within – which estate owners, overseers, and enslaved people lived. Historical sources and oral traditions may help locate earlier engenhos, but the locations of more recent roças are well known (Figure 4). Analysing their layout from an architectural standpoint reveals how Portuguese-derived models of estate organization were translated into the realities of island life (Courela 2019, 64–67). Significantly, the main houses were generally placed centrally, sometimes at the end of a long approach. The barracks (sanzalas) used to house labourers typically faced them, usually across a large open court, with auxiliary buildings (offices, stores, workshops) placed to the side or at the margins; hospitals tended to be at greater distance, while chapels – if present – were often near the main house, drawing secular and religious authority together. Visually, an emphasis on surveillance of the workforce is clear, as on many Caribbean plantations (e.g. Singleton 2001), with the main houses – and sometimes other buildings – constructed on an imposing scale; Sundy, for instance, has an impressive set of medieval-inspired stables of much better construction than the adjacent sanzalas (Carvalho 2020, 46).

Figure 4. Map of the location of roças on São Tomé and Príncipe (after Courela 2019, Fig. 50).

Second, neither in the pre-roça era nor the period of forced labour following slavery’s abolition was Santomean society homogeneous. Genetic, linguistic, and historical sources confirm the diverse ancestry of the archipelago’s population, reflected in the persistence of three creole languages and a small, self-identifying Angolar community with its own distinctive origins story. Lungwa Santome, the oldest documented creole and the one most widely spoken on São Tomé (Seibert 2012), has a roughly equal mix of terms derived from Kikongo and the Edoid languages associated with the kingdom of Benin. It thus reflects a situation in which prior to 1520 most slaves came from southern Nigeria, only to be replaced by people from Kongo/Angola by the mid-sixteenth century. Conversely, the African lexical contribution to Lung’yie (spoken on Príncipe) is almost exclusively Edoid-derived, although genetic data point to roughly equal West and Central African ancestral inputs in both islands (Hagemeijer and Rocha 2017). Lunga Ngolá, the creole of São Tomé’s Angolares, nevertheless has a more strongly Western Bantu origin that is particularly grounded in Kimbundu, an Angolan language. Its speakers also show markedly reduced male diversity, consistent with origins in a small, patrilineally related group (Coelho et al. 2008), although claims for descent from shipwrecked Angolan slaves in the mid-1500s lack historical foundation (Seibert 2015).

More likely, the Angolares were but the most successful of those who escaped enslavement to build a new life in the rugged, forested interior and south of São Tomé (Figure 5), maintaining their autonomy until the late 1800s, eventually around the settlement named after them, São João dos Angolares (Seibert 2015). Of course, resistance to slavery took many forms, from refusing European dress (Thornton 2012, 170) to attempting to flee the island by sea, instances of which are recorded as early as 1499. Flight within the island is also documented by this date, with free settlements (mocambos) subsisting principally on yams, oil palm, and plantain, the traditional mainstays of Central Africa (Caldeira 2004). However, it was difficult, if not impossible, to survive independently of exchanges with, or raids on, plantations: salt, plus iron for tools and weapons, were both unavailable in São Tomé’s interior, and new recruits, especially women, were also actively sought, along with food (Caldeira 2017). Archaeology has successfully identified maroon (fugitive slave)-occupied sites in difficult-to-access locations on both Mauritius and Réunion (e.g. Dijoux 2016), as well as more generally in the Americas (Weik 1997). One common problem, particularly in tropical environments, is the ephemeral nature of the settlements themselves and any structures built at them. However, the capacity of the Angolares, at least, to maintain independence over some centuries suggests that field survey, textual references, and any surviving oral traditions might together succeed in finding archaeological traces of maroon occupations in São Tomé and Príncipe. Certainly, there is greater likelihood of this than of locating evidence of more spectacular, but shorter-lived widespread uprisings (Seibert 2011).

Figure 5. This view of Cão Grande, which rises to 663 m a.s.l., conveys a sense of the ruggedness and impenetrability of the interiors of São Tomé and Príncipe that favoured the survival of escaped slaves and their resistance to colonial control (courtesy Helena Van Eykeren, CC BY 2.0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Pico_Cão_Grande#/media/File:2012SaoTome-302_(8042910990).jpg).

As well as exploring resistance to enslavement, the historical archaeology of islands also emphasizes how new, creolized communities developed out of the many diverse heritages from which their populations were drawn. This is perhaps most vividly evident in São Tomé and Príncipe in the traditional theatre of the former’s Tchiloli (Figure 6) and the latter’s Auto de Floripes. While both trace their ultimate origins to medieval European plays about Charlemagne, they are greatly enriched by religious and political understandings that have an African source and critique the power imbalances of the colonial (and now also post-colonial) eras (Celani 2012; Dumas 2021; Valbert 1987). More generally, Seibert (2012) has argued that São Tomé and Príncipe, along with Cape Verde, were the first creolized societies in Atlantic history, forged via the interaction and integration of European and African settlers in previously uninhabited settings. Building on observations made earlier, this could be explored archaeologically by seeking material culture associated with the two culturally/linguistically quite different directions from which slaves were sourced, the Benin region of southern Nigeria and the Bantu-speaking world of Congo/Angola. Such evidence, and signs of further interaction with Portuguese norms, might exist in areas as diverse as cuisine, the organization of domestic space, and technology (ceramic chaînes opératoires?). A crucial moment of change, and one well worth exploring if suitable sites can be located, likely fell in the late seventeenth/eighteenth centuries when, following sugar’s collapse, slavery persisted in predominantly household contexts, but most owners were themselves African (Seibert 2013). In like manner, the highly unusual fact that some early estates belonged to members of the Kongo (and possibly Benin) élites opens the fascinating prospect of trying to identify and investigate sixteenth-century plantations owned by Africans, not Europeans (Thornton 2012, 213–214). Much more recently, the varying Angolan/Mozambican/Cape Verdean heritages of those working on the roças post-abolition also offer opportunities of seeing how familiar ways of being and habitual uses of space and material culture were transformed in new settings, paralleling pioneering investigations of indentured labourer experience in Mauritius (Haines 2020).

Figure 6. A scene from a performance of the Tchiloli in front of the church of São Pedro, São Tomé city (courtesy Ji-Elle CC BY-SA 4.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/São_Tomé_and_Pr%C3%ADncipe#/media/File:Tchiloli_à_São_Tomé_(56).jpg).

The past in the present: Santomean roças as contemporary archaeology

An archaeological gaze in São Tomé and Príncipe need not be confined to analysing specific spatio-temporal phenomena. It could also involve interrogating diachronic change and living heritage, including examining how the materiality of objects, buildings, and wider ecologies continues to actively structure the lifeways of contemporary populations. Such an approach draws upon archaeology’s unique multi-temporal perspectives and propensity for studying everyday objects and landscapes in ways that materialize histories, memories, and practices that are otherwise missed in broader immaterial historical analyses or synchronic ethnographic observations (Buchli and Lucas 2001; Harrison and Schofield 2010).

The potential for this is perhaps most evident in the recent history of the islands’ roças and plantation infrastructures, which do not simply exist as the remnants of bygone times in desperate need of restoration before they fall into disrepair. Rather, they have their own unique material biographies that continue to give rise to novel forms of engagement as they become integrated into new socioeconomic contexts. Indeed, with the nationalization of the roças in 1975, followed by later processes of estate privatization and the fragmentation of the island-wide plantation economy, there have been continual transformations in land use patterns, management, and ownership (Seibert 2016). The material correlates of these processes have yet to be fully comprehended, offering fertile ground for questions surrounding the active role of living archaeology and historic architecture in the ongoing shaping of quotidian practice. For example, the present day remains of dilapidated plantation infrastructure at Agostinho Neto, Água Izé, and Vista Alegre continue to be used by descendants of plantation workers as these roças morph into small urban centres, albeit in different ways to their intended design and purpose (Fernandes et al. 2012b; Lobo 2012) (Figure 7). In contrast, other roças, such as Sundy or Belo Monte on Príncipe (Carvalho 2020), have been renovated and turned into up-market holiday destinations, once again integrated into global economies, this time via the international ecotourism market. Such situations pose unique milieux in which to interrogate the entanglement between objects and the built environment with notions of belonging, identity, memory, the reorientation of social and economic life, shifting human-environment relations, and the enduring impacts of colonialism in the present day.

Figure 7. Re-use of the main plantation house at Roça Porto Alegre in the far south of São Tomé (courtesy Ji-Elle CC BY-SA 4.0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vestiges_de_l%27ancienne_roça_de_Porto_Alegre_(São_Tomé)_(2).jpg).

In light of this, we emphasize how archaeological methods, including landscape surveys, scaled drawings, excavations, and the meticulous analysis of material culture through a range of theoretical prisms, in conjunction with the collection of oral histories and ethnographic observations, can help build more nuanced understandings of the changing livelihoods of island populations and their integration into wider material flows of expanding global economies. This temporal expansion of archaeological enquiry into the present will not only enrich material investigations into deeper historical processes. It may also allow archaeologists to become involved in collaborative approaches towards managing living archaeology in ways that do not isolate communities from their own heritage. More broadly, temporally attuned and materially centred methodologies focused on the contemporary world can play an important role in ongoing discussions concerning the archipelago’s future development, including how new objects, ideas, and practices will inevitably become entangled with older socio-material regimes.

Conclusion

African islands remain largely absent from the sub-discipline that is island archaeology, particularly those on the continent’s Atlantic side. São Tomé and Príncipe offers multiple opportunities for redressing this situation while simultaneously bringing the evidence of material culture and excavation to bear upon a past hitherto reconstructed almost entirely from documentary sources. The archipelago’s historical significance as the first tropical plantation economy, a crucial node in initiating both the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the Columbian Exchange, the earliest Christian diocese south of the Equator (1534), a pioneering centre in African coffee and cacao production, and an enduring focus of indentured labour post-abolition is clear. So, too, is its relevance as the home of some of the oldest maroon societies in the world. Along with establishing a palaeoenvironmental record to contextualize the islands’ historical ecology, these features of São Tomé and Príncipe’s past provide a globally all too rare example of island colonization, one where settlement was initiated in historical times and within the context of developing plantation economies worked by enslaved labour that transformed the landscape of what had, before the 1470s, been a true terra nullius, free from prior human occupation or interference. All these topics are ripe for archaeological exploration provided that this is undertaken sensitively, collaboratively, and with an emphasis on building local capacity and developing local heritage infrastructure (cf. Sørenson, Evans, and Richter 2011).

Exploring São Tomé and Príncipe’s archaeology will not only encounter and challenge the dragons lurking in the unexplored facets of its own past, but also speak to multiple issues in the archaeology of islands worldwide. Additionally, it will make a significant contribution to archaeological work in the wider Gulf of Guinea, where Annobón experienced a similar history of slavery followed by effective independence and recolonization (Caldeira 2009) and Bioko, which did have an indigenous population (Clist and De Maret 2021), also witnessed creolization and plantation economies run on imported, as well as local, forced labour (Campos Serrano 2018). While archaeological work relevant to the last 500 years has so far only been undertaken on the tiny island of Corisco (González-Ruibal 2015), collectively the islands of the Gulf of Guinea stand ready to write a new chapter in the archaeology of Africa’s islands and contribute a much-needed African perspective to island archaeology as a whole.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter Mitchell

Peter Mitchell is Professor of African Archaeology at the University of Oxford and Tutor and Fellow in Archaeology at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, as well as a Research Associate of the Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand.

Samuel Lunn-Rockliffe

Samuel Lunn-Rockliffe is Research Fellow in the Institute for Global Prosperity, University College London.

Notes

1. The path of the eclipse’s totality stretched from southeastern Peru across Amazonia (where northeastern Brazil provided the other observation point) and the Atlantic Ocean, over Príncipe, and onward through the rainforests of the Congo Basin to end in the far north of Mozambique (Kennefick 2019).