Search Results: Guinea bissau

This is a seated figure by a Sape artist who lived in what is now present-day Sierra Leone or Guinea. It is made from soapstone with applied coating and dates from perhaps 1400-1500 CE. (Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto)

Jules Sébastien César Dumont d'Urville (1790-1842) was born at Condé sur Noireau, Normandy, France. He was a French explorer and navigator who made three voyages of discovery to Aotearoa New Zealand between 1827 and 1840. Dumont d'Urville...

Agriculture arose independently at several locations across the world, beginning about 12,000 years ago. The first crops and livestock were domesticated in six rather diffuse areas including the Near East, China, Southeast Asia, and Africa...

Matthew Flinders (1774-1814) was an English navigator and hydrographer. He was the first person to map the coastal outline of Australia in 1801-1803, following his circumnavigation of the 7.692 million square kilometres (2.96 million square...

The Inca empire controlled four climate zones and, consequently, their agricultural produce was diverse. Ancient Andean people were largely vegetarian, supplementing their diet with camelid meat and seafood if they could. The Incas developed...

From a humble beginning as a sweet treat grown in gardens, sugar cane cultivation became an economic powerhouse, and the growing demand for sugar stimulated the colonization of the New World by European powers, brought slavery to the forefront...

West Africa was one of the world's greatest producers of gold in the Middle Ages. Trade in the metal went back to antiquity but when the camel caravans of the Sahara linked North Africa to the savannah interior, the trade really took off...

São Tomé and Principe are islands located in the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa. They were uninhabited before being colonised by the Portuguese from 1486. So involved were they with the slave trade, they became known as the Slave Islands where...

The art of the Inca civilization of Peru (c. 1425-1532 CE) produced some of the finest works ever crafted in the ancient Americas. Inca art is best seen in highly polished metalwork, ceramics, and, above all, textiles, which was considered...

The Golden Age of Piracy (1690-1730) refers to a period when robbery on the high seas and at colonial ports reached an unprecedented level. Although not all historians agree on the precise time frame, it is generally applied to those pirates...