Abandoned sugar mill has oldest traces of plantation slavery

Despite high rates of malaria that earned it a grim reputation, the Portuguese monarchy aimed to populate the island. By 1495, convicts, Jewish children, and enslaved Africans were forcibly relocated there to supply labor for the burgeoning sugar trade.

Unlike other Portuguese sugar mills that relied on enslaved individuals solely for manual labor, São Tomé's sugar plantation system involved enslaved workers performing a wide range of tasks. 

These tasks spanned from harvesting and processing sugarcane to carpentry and stone masonry required to construct and operate the mills. 

This unique system laid the foundation for what the researchers have termed "the first plantation economy in the tropics based on sugar monoculture and slave labor."

The island's success in sugar production was so great that by the 1530s, São Tomé had outstripped Madeira, an Atlantic archipelago that was a center of Portuguese sugar operations. 

Dozens of sugar mills were established in São Tomé, with the newly analyzed Praia Melão estate being the focus of this study. 

"Sugar production was a very complex process," said lead researcher Dr. M. Dores Cruz, a historical anthropologist in the Department of African Studies at the University of Cologne in Germany, told Live Science.

"It was not packed in bags and loose as today."

The fall of the sugar mill

Her team of archaeologists explained that the sugar mill at Praia Melão, a two-story stone building, played a crucial role in the sugar production process. It featured domestic quarters on the top floor and a sugar-boiling room on the lower floor. 

They also uncovered fragments of ceramic sugar molds resembling those used in Madeira.

However, São Tomé's success was not without challenges. The island grappled with the demands of sugar production due to high humidity, rapidly growing forests, and slave uprisings. 

Ultimately, the Portuguese shifted their operations to Brazil in the early 17th century, taking the plantation model with them.

Although the São Tomé mills deteriorated by the 19th century, the authors advise that the research would be vital in understanding the sugar-slave link. 

The complete study was published in Antiquity on August 14 and can be found here.

Study abstract:

Praia Melão, the largest sugar mill and estate in São Tomé, active from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, is the first archaeological site ever investigated on the island. It embodies the inception of the plantation economic system predicated on the labour of enslaved people and of local resistance.