In 2009, an excavation carried out in Valle da Gafaria, Lagos, Portugal, allowed for the recovery of the skeletal remains of 158 individuals buried in a dump used during the 15th–17th centuries. The archaeological context of the findings, the presence of African items associated with the skeletons, the skulls' morphology, and the presence of intentionally modified teeth suggest that these individuals were African enslaved individuals. The aim of this work is to analyse how these men, women, and children were inhumed according to their sex and age (adults vs. non-adults). Adults were mostly buried in supine position (54.3%). However, more women (27.3%) than men (9.5%) were inhumed in prone position. In non-adults, the most common positions were the supine (36.2%) and the lateralis (38.8%). The foetal position was more commonly found in non-adults (25.0%) than adults (4.3%, only women). Both adults (79.4%) and non-adults (80.0%) were mostly buried with an orientation other than the typical Christian canonical practice at the time (head to west and feet to east). More non-adult individuals (66.7%) appear to have been buried with care than adults (38.8%). Regarding both the orientation and the burial care, no differences were found between the sexes. Pieces of evidence of having been tied were found in four females, one male, and one non-adult individual. All these results support the hypothesis that these individuals were discarded, bringing light to the way these African enslaved individuals were treated even at their death.

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Rui Martiniano, Catarina Coelho, Maria Teresa Ferreira, Maria João Neves, Ron Pinhasi & Daniel G. Bradley

An archaeological excavation in Valle da Gafaria (Lagos, Portugal), revealed two contiguous burial places outside the medieval city walls, dating from the 15^th–17^th centuries AD: one was interpreted as a Leprosarium cemetery and the second as an urban discard deposit, where signs of violent, unceremonious burials suggested that these remains may belong to slaves captured in Africa by the Portuguese. We obtained random short autosomal sequence reads from seven individuals: two from the latter site and five from the Leprosarium and used these to call SNP identities and estimate ancestral affinities with modern reference data. The Leprosarium site samples were less preserved but gave some probability of both African and European ancestry. The two discard deposit burials each gave African affinity signals, which were further refined toward modern West African or Bantu genotyped samples. These data from distressed burials illustrate an African contribution to a low status stratum of Lagos society at a time when this port became a hub of the European trade in African slaves which formed a precursor to the transatlantic transfer of millions.