The daughter of a Portuguese father and Spanish mother, Rio resident Ana Maria de la Mercad Guimaraes always had a great interest in the past. Yet she had no idea how much her life would change after she bought a house which was built in 1866 in Rua Pedro Ernesto, in the Gamboa neighbourhood. In 1996, she and her husband Petruccio dos Anjos, were in the middle of home improvement works where they lived with their three daughters. One day, Merced received a call at work. Stunned, she heard that the works in their house had uncovered a handful of bones.
She realised that she was sitting on an archaeological site. Until that moment, there was no material which referred to the existence of the Cemetery of New Blacks, which was used to bury slaves coming from Africa who had died by the time the boat arrived in Guanabara Bay, or who had died after disembarking. All of a sudden, the house that she had chosen to live in with her family became a kind of home to six other people, among them archaeologists and excavation specialists.
Twenty-eight skeletons had their bones put together and studied. The studies revealed some details about the dead: they were between three and 25 years old, and were of both sexes.
The historian Julio Cesar Medeiros relates in his book Flower of the Earth: the Cemetery of the New Blacks in Rio de Janeiro that the bodies were buried at just a handspan’s depth below the surface of the earth.
More than six thousand slaves were buried here between 1824 and 1830, according to historical registrations by the Santa Rita Church.
To Publica, he confirmed categorically: there are more bodies buried in the area around the Cemetery of New Blacks and neighbouring houses. “I say this because I have only calculated the number buried in the Cemetery during a very short space of time, with obituaries registered in the Santa Rita parish, between 1824 and 1830.”
He adds “We still don’t know where the quarantine hospital was in Valongo. Those who didn’t survive there were taken directly to the Cemetery of New Blacks. There is still a lot more to be researched in the port area.”
The president of the Company of Urban Development of the Rio Port Area (Cdurp), Alberto Silva, confirmed in an interview with Publica that research by the National Museum and Rio de Janeiro’s Federal University that houses in the streets Pedro Ernesto, Leoncio de Albuquerque e do Proposito are also in the area covered by the cemetery. They have never been excavated.