What are the African connections to American cotton?
By Chelsie Vandaveer
March 5, 2002
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Around 5,500 years ago in the lowlands of South America, people began cultivating and weaving textiles from a weedy cotton, Gossypium barbadense. Archaeobotanists feel this cotton probably was once widespread along both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Today only a few relict populations of the wild type remain in the lowlands of Ecuador.
By 1000 BCE, the cultures in South America had selected strains of the cotton, domesticating the plant. The cotton bolls of those cultures are little different than the modern cultivars of Gossypium barbadense.
The cotton these cultures selected to grow is a unique plant, a tetraploid, AADD (4n = 52 chromosomes). None of the New World diploid cottons produce lint of which cotton thread can be spun. Gossypium barbadense is an enigma, a hybrid of the African cotton, Gossypium herbaceum (AA) and the New World cotton, Gossypium raimondii (DD).
The South American cultures are mostly forgotten: the Chavin, Nepeña, Nazca, Moche, and Chimu. They left intriguing artifacts: clay panpipes, whistling water jars, bronze goods, gold jewelry, and remnants of fine textiles.
The cultivation of Gossypium barbadense spread across South America to the Caribbean Islands. When Columbus 'discovered' the West Indies, the island peoples were growing G. barbadense. The lint was superior to the cottons of the Old World.
Within one hundred and sixty years, Barbados had the first commercial slave plantation cultivating and exporting cotton. It is a bitter irony; a plant descended from African cotton would promote the African slave trade.
The Botany Department of the University of Hawaii-Manoa has posted a photograph of Gossypium barbadense. To view Gerald Carr's photograph, click on the link:
http://www.botany.hawaii.edu/faculty/carr/images/gos_bar.jpg 
Eckerd College has posted an article about the whistling water jars by Brian Ransom.
Click here to learn more about these artifacts
killerPlants Tendrils: ~~1~~2~~3~~4~~5~~
Suggested Reading:
What was the tree-wool of India? Plants that Changed History - February 19, 2002
What is the Mayan cotton tale? Plants that Changed History - March 12, 2002
What was the cotton of Kush? Plants that Changed History - February 26, 2002
Why must her host be cancelled to be recognized? Renfield's Garden - February 27, 2002
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Ceramic vases, 'Brave Warrior, Fierce Feline' (pair)
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In celebration of Peru's Nazca and Chimú cultures, Miguel Sifuentes crafts captivating pair of ceremonial huaco vases. A valiant warrior dressed in Chimú attire expresses courage and determination, while the Nazca vase features the feline's rounded body with a human head between its fangs. Sifuentes replicates the huacos as he shapes them of ceramic with techniques developed by these early cultures.
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Earrings, 'Nazca Monkeys'
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Zoila Hidalgo depicts one of the famous Nazca designs on silver earrings. The mysterious figures were created about 2,000 years ago on the Nazca Plain, about 200 miles south of Lima. Probably the best-known examples of geoglyphs in the world, the figures can be seen in their entirety only from the air and cover an area of almost 190 square miles. The Nazca monkey alone covers some 360 feet.
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Olmec Colossal Head - La Venta, Mexico. 1000B.C.
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Few of the world’s art treasures conceal more mysteries than the stone sculptures of the Olmecs, the Gulf Coast people who created Mesoamerica’s first civilization more than 3000 years ago. The objects range from exquisite miniatures fashioned from jade and serpentine to colossal stone heads.
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One feature that distinguishes them from the art of later peoples is their stark realism, many of the sculptures are fashioned in the round, portraying the human figure in squat but accurate detail. Almost two meters high and weighing over 15 tons, this monumental head is one of four found at La Venta, near the Gulf Coast.
Scholars speculate that they may have portrayed rulers of the city. The Olmecs wrought these colossal heads from huge boulders of basalt from the Tuxtla mountains, 100 km away and they must have floated them on balsa rafts along the slow-moving rivers of the Gulf Coast.
At La Venta, the four colossal heads were set as if to guard the ceremonial core of the site, three to the south and one to the north, all with their backs to the architecture.
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Jubilee: The Emergence of African-American Culture
National Geographic®
Slaves came to the Americas from many different parts of the African continent, bringing with them distinct languages, religions, and expressive arts. Jubilee shows the many ways that these diverse peoples united, forged their own identity, and laid the foundations for truly unique African-American social, cultural, political, and economic expressions throughout the Western Hemisphere.
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Jubilee is written by Howard Dodson, chief of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Cultureùone of the most prominent institutions of black scholarship in the world. Essays by leading voices in African-American history and literature, including Henry Louis Gates, Jr., John Hope Franklin, Amiri Bakara, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Gail Buckley explore topics such as abolition and emancipation, changes in family life and social development, religion, and the evolution of language, literacy, and education through the end of Reconstruction.
This illuminating text is surrounded by more than 200 stunning illustrations, pulled from the Schomburg collection of more than 5 million items. From slave ship manifests, manumission papers, and some of the earliest photographs of slaves to carved items that echo African sculpture and freedom quilts with African motifs, the book is richly illustrated in an interactive way that brings to life this crucial transition from slavery to freedom.
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