The practice of slavery has been common across a variety of cultures around the globe and throughout history. Despite the multiplicity of slavery's manifestations, many scholars have used a simple binary to categorize slave-holding groups as either 'genuine slave societies' or 'societies with slaves'. This dichotomy, as originally proposed by ancient historian Moses Finley, assumes that there were just five 'genuine slave societies' in all of human history: ancient Greece and Rome, and the colonial Caribbean, Brazil, and the American South. This book interrogates this bedrock of comparative slave studies and tests its worth. Assembling contributions from top specialists, it demonstrates that the catalogue of five must be expanded and that the model may need to be replaced with a more flexible system that emphasizes the notion of intensification. The issue is approached as a question, allowing for debate between the seventeen contributors about how best to conceptualize the comparative study of human bondage.

The practice of slavery has been common across a variety of cultures around the globe and throughout history. Despite the multiplicity of slavery's manifestations, many scholars have used a simple binary to categorize slave-holding groups as either 'genuine slave societies' or 'societies with slaves'. This dichotomy, as originally proposed by ancient historian Moses Finley, assumes that there were just five 'genuine slave societies' in all of human history: ancient Greece and Rome, and the colonial Caribbean, Brazil, and the American South. This book interrogates this bedrock of comparative slave studies and tests its worth. Assembling contributions from top specialists, it demonstrates that the catalogue of five must be expanded and that the model may need to be replaced with a more flexible system that emphasizes the notion of intensification. The issue is approached as a question, allowing for debate between the seventeen contributors about how best to conceptualize the comparative study of human bondage.

In Captives: How Stolen People Changed the World archaeologist Catherine M. Cameron provides an eye-opening comparative study of the profound impact captives of warfare and raiding have had on small-scale societies through time. Cameron provides a new point of orientation for archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, and other scholars by illuminating the impact that captive-taking and enslavement have had on cultural change, with important implications for understanding the past. Focusing primarily on indigenous societies in the Americas while extending the comparative reach to include Europe, Africa, and Island Southeast Asia, Cameron draws on ethnographic, ethnohistoric, historic, and archaeological data to examine the roles that captives played in small-scale societies. In such societies, captives represented an almost universal social category consisting predominantly of women and children and constituting 10 to 50 percent of the population in a given society. Cameron demonstrates how captives brought with them new technologies, design styles, foodways, religious practices, and more, all of which changed the captor culture. This book provides a framework that will enable archaeologists to understand the scale and nature of cultural transmission by captives, and it will also interest anthropologists, historians, and other scholars who study captive-taking and slavery. Cameron’s exploration of the peculiar amnesia that surrounds memories of captive-taking and enslavement around the world also establishes a connection with unmistakable contemporary relevance.    

In Captives: How Stolen People Changed the World archaeologist Catherine M. Cameron provides an eye-opening comparative study of the profound impact captives of warfare and raiding have had on small-scale societies through time. Cameron provides a new point of orientation for archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, and other scholars by illuminating the impact that captive-taking and enslavement have had on cultural change, with important implications for understanding the past. Focusing primarily on indigenous societies in the Americas while extending the comparative reach to include Europe, Africa, and Island Southeast Asia, Cameron draws on ethnographic, ethnohistoric, historic, and archaeological data to examine the roles that captives played in small-scale societies. In such societies, captives represented an almost universal social category consisting predominantly of women and children and constituting 10 to 50 percent of the population in a given society. Cameron demonstrates how captives brought with them new technologies, design styles, foodways, religious practices, and more, all of which changed the captor culture. This book provides a framework that will enable archaeologists to understand the scale and nature of cultural transmission by captives, and it will also interest anthropologists, historians, and other scholars who study captive-taking and slavery. Cameron's exploration of the peculiar amnesia that surrounds memories of captive-taking and enslavement around the world also establishes a connection with unmistakable contemporary relevance.

Groups of people abandoned sites in different ways, and for different reasons. And what they did when they left a settlement or area had a direct bearing on the kind and quality of cultural remains that entered the archaeological record, for example, whether buildings were dismantled or left standing, or tools buried, destroyed or removed from the site. Contributors to this unique collection on site abandonment draw on ethnoarchaeological and archaeological data from North and South America, Europe, Africa, and the Near East.