Injection: An Archaeological Approach to Slavery

Abstract

AbstractSlaves and other marginalized people may have made up a large proportion of the world’s population in the past, but because of their marginality they are very difficult to find in the archaeological record. This injection reviews the lines of evidence that archaeologists are developing to identify these largely “invisible” people and explore the lives they lived. The discussion considers first state-level societies, and then small-scale societies. Although classical archaeologists have made little use of archaeology to study slavery, North American archaeologists have demonstrated the rich understandings of the slave experience that archaeology can uncover and offer methods that classical archaeologists might adopt. The study of archaeology of slavery in small-scale societies is just beginning but has the potential to transform our understanding of the nature of social relationships among these groups.