Injection: An Archaeological Approach to Slavery

Abstract

Slaves 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.

Introduction

Orlando Patterson’s transformative global study of slavery opens with the observation: “Probably there is no group of people whose ancestors were not at one time slaves or slaveholders.”¹ The remainder of the book confirms the truth of this statement. People have been captured and enslaved everywhere, as far back in time as we can see. Yet, until relatively recently, these vast millions of enslaved people were largely forgotten. They were marginal in life and they became invisible in death. The role of archaeology is to recover peoples and cultures of the past, reconstruct their lifeways, and use those reconstructions to explore cultural development through time. Our understanding of the past is skewed, however, if we overlook a significant proportion of the past’s peoples—in fact, an entire category of people: the world’s slaves. Just as classicists, historians, and other scholars have awakened to the need to investigate slavery, archaeologists have become aware of the need to identify slaves in the archaeological record and explore their lives and the effects they had on the societies in which they toiled.

Finding slaves in the archaeological record first requires acknowledging that they existed and then devising methods to identify them. Slaves, like women and children, were invisible to archaeologists until relatively recently. Part of this obliviousness results from a remarkable period of forgetting that occurred during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries as laws against slavery were enacted around the world. Where the presence of slavery was undeniable, as in the southern United States, there was an embarrassed silence. The world’s most brutal slave regime was referred to as the South’s “peculiar institution.” It took the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and the empowerment of African Americans to waken archaeologists to the potential of an archaeology of slavery.²

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 is organized by societal scale. The first section, on state-level societies, focuses on ancient Greece and Rome, emphasizing the paucity of archaeological study of slavery in classical societies. Classical scholars have been advised to look to the extensive archaeological study of the African diaspora, the best-studied slave population. Methods and examples from the American South and Caribbean are explored as a guide for archaeological study of classical societies. The second section explores recent work on the archaeology of slavery in small-scale societies.

The Archaeology of Slavery in State-Level Society

There is little doubt that slaves existed in state-level societies from earliest times; many early states were built and operated using slaves. Slaves appear in early cuneiform tablets in Mesopotamia and they are depicted in bas relief at Angkor Wat. Slaves are characters in ancient Greek and Roman plays and were portrayed on Greek vases and on Roman mosaics and murals. Figurines of slaves are found in ancient China, sometimes in graves, where they served their master in the afterlife. Although they appear in art and literature, until the past few decades, slaves were rarely the subject of archaeological study in most parts of the world.

In contrast, in the American South archaeologists have studied slavery for more than sixty years. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, historic preservation legislation, and the involvement of African-American organizations and individuals combined to increase awareness of the African-American past and the role that archaeology can play in recovering that past.³

Classical Archaeology

Texts describing slaves and images of slaves found on pottery decorations, murals, sculptures, and more make clear that slaves were numerous in both ancient Greece and Rome. Nevertheless, archaeological studies of slavery in the classical world are not well developed. This is in part because classicists see textual evidence as more valuable and material evidence of slaves difficult to identify.⁴ Human remains can provide evidence of slave status, as with the two men discovered at Pompeii in 2020.⁵ The younger man’s body showed evidence of hard work and the older man’s did not; they were assumed to be slave and master.

In spite of the obvious presence of slaves, efforts to identify slave dwellings have met with difficulty. At times, structures have been proposed as slave houses based on their location or layout, but there proves to be little confirmatory evidence. For example, Greek agricultural sites often have a rectangular or circular tower which has been purported to be an accommodation for female slaves based on only a single text that mentions their use for that purpose. The island of Delos was well-known as a major slave market in the first few centuries B.C. and had large estates worked by slaves. Small cell-like lower-story rooms in buildings on these estates have been suggested as slave quarters with the further assumption that males and females were spatially separated, but there is no material evidence that supports this suggested use.⁶ Many slaves are known to have lived and worked at the Greek mines of Attica making this an obvious place to find evidence of slave lives. Given the likelihood that slaves were procured from distant places, pottery and habitations in this mining region might logically have been made in the style of the areas from which slaves came.⁷ Yet this proved not to be the case. It is almost certain that slaves were present at the settlements near the mines of Attica, but to date there is little supporting material evidence.

Material evidence for slaves during the centuries of the Roman Republic and Empire is somewhat greater, but not robust. Recent excavations in a suburb of Pompeii have uncovered a small, cramped room that excavators interpret as slave quarters; it had three beds, two adult sized and one apparently for a child.⁸ Texts report underground slave prisons called “ergastula” where slaves could be held, often in chains, and sometimes were worked there. These structures were described in texts as semi-subterranean with high barred windows, but rooms fitting this description have rarely been found.⁹ Other material evidence of slaves, found during the time of the Roman Empire, are slave collars.¹⁰ These objects involved a metal collar that fit around a slave’s neck and was inscribed with the slave’s name and instructions to hold or return them if found; alternately the collar was uninscribed and used to suspend a small metal plate (bulla) on which information about the slave was engraved. Slave collars and bulla are infrequently found.

Archaeologists have recognized that likely many thousand slaves were sold every year across the Roman empire but identifying slave markets has been elusive. Using texts, images, and building layout, Fentress explores four buildings in Roman Italy for evidence of the sale of slaves at the front of these buildings.¹¹ She looked especially for porticos (chalcidica) where slaves could be displayed, likely on platforms (catastae), and an architectural layout that would have controlled the flow of movement to and from this location. Although evidence for the sale of slaves was not conclusive, she reasoned that slave sales at the front of these buildings were likely and in all cases occurred in central, monumental areas of the cities. In other words, the sale of human beings in Imperial Rome was not hidden, but was a public activity, a part of the daily life of the citizens of these towns.

The material evidence for slavery in classical Greece and Rome is not extensive and some scholars argue that more effort needs to be put into developing this field of study. Jane Webster argues persuasively that a comparison of slavery in the classical world with that in the New World or elsewhere would provide avenues for research that could reveal slaves in the ancient classical world.¹² For example, rather than imagining foreign slaves continuing to create material culture like that of their birthplace, as Ian Morris suggested for slaves in the Greek mines of Attica, classical archaeologists should recognize that slaves might blend the material culture of their masters with that of their homeland, creating a distinctive new identity expressed in classical material culture—as was observed by archaeologists of the African diaspora. In other words, before determining that an archaeology of slavery in the classical world is unimportant, new approaches to finding slaves in the material record need to be developed.

African Diaspora

Archaeologists studying the African diaspora have demonstrated the rich understandings of the slave experience that archaeology can uncover. They have set the tone for an archaeology of slavery elsewhere, and their work can help classical scholars as they develop an archaeology of ancient Greece and Rome. Archaeologists studying slavery of the African diaspora had an advantage over classical scholars in that slave housing and associated artifacts are generally easily identified, at least for large plantations. Extensive descriptions of slave cabins exist for these plantations, and in the nineteenth century there are even photographs. The living spaces and associated artifacts are much more poorly known in holdings that had only one or a few slaves because their housing and material culture blurred with that of their masters.

Archaeological studies of the enslavement of Africans in the New World initially attempted to explore the lifeways of slaves. Zooarchaeological and paleoethnobotanical studies of animal and plant remains from slave cabins on plantations have been used to reconstruct the types and quantities of foods slaves ate, including both domestic and wild sources. Although masters nominally provided enslaved peoples with food, archaeological remains demonstrated that their diet was often extensively supplemented with wild foods that they procured themselves. Houses occupied by enslaved people were mostly built using designs and materials provided by the master. But archaeology has revealed modifications to these structures in response to the needs of their occupants. For example, during excavations at the Seville Plantation in Jamaica, slaves used the yard surrounding house structures for gardening, food preparation, and social and ritual activities.¹³ In other words, slaves reoriented their living space in ways that addressed their needs and took advantage of the environment (such as cooling sea breezes), even though forced to accommodate to structures dictated by their masters. In some parts of the American South, slaves dug pits in the floors of their dwellings to store food and valuables, in spite of opposition of their masters to this practice.¹⁴ Slaves used their houses to create personal space in their otherwise tightly controlled lives.

New World archaeologists use artifacts to reconstruct the social identities and ritual practices of slaves. Early studies aimed to link African-American slaves to their African origins by attempting to locate objects from Africa or objects made in an African fashion. Eventually, archaeologists recognized that African Americans, like any other migratory group, blended the cultural elements they brought with them with the cultural practices of the people with whom they interacted in the New World, creating a distinctive African-American culture. One of the most widely known artifact types associated with enslaved African Americans is a handmade earthenware pottery type called Colonoware. Colonoware is found on sites in the American South that had large populations of African slaves, dating to the colonial period. A study of Colonoware from nineteenth-century archaeological sites in Manassas, Virginia, demonstrates that only the enslaved used Colonoware and that it was associated with slave status.¹⁵ Although some archaeologists have argued that Colonoware provides evidence for efforts by slaves to continue an African identity, more recent studies reject that view. With emancipation, Colonoware was quickly abandoned as liberated African Americans were able to exercise consumer choice in the pottery they used.

In other studies, artifact caches and designs on artifacts have been used to recover distinctive African-American ritual practices. Scholars have found that African Americans used symbols on everyday objects as a method of communicating beliefs that drew on both West African and Christian European elements and those were being passed on to future generations.¹⁶ One example is the BaKongo cosmogram, which likely served as an initial model for crossroads symbols that are found on a variety of artifacts in the remains of many slave communities, including pottery, buttons, spoons, metal objects, and more. This “X” symbol was also reproduced and hidden beneath the floors of important buildings (churches, midwife cabins) with caches of ritual objects buried in each cardinal direction. Rather than simply a carry-over of African rituals, such symbols were distinctively African-American and linked enslaved people across the plantation South in a common symbolic understanding that was “hidden in plain sight” from the dominant society.

Finding Slaves in Small-Scale Societies

Archaeologists have only begun to study slavery in small-scale societies within the past two decades, but already new methods are being introduced that promise to illuminate marginalized peoples that, until recently, few archaeologists would have imagined existed. The recognition that slaves existed in small-scale societies in the past is not insignificant. Archaeologists have envisioned such groups as egalitarian with social differentiations based largely on age and sex. The presence of slaves, of course, means that marginalized people were common in small-scale societies and that significant social variability was a normal part of life in such communities. Furthermore, the ownership of slaves provided an opportunity for the individuals that held them to gain power. In state-level societies, slaves clearly provided enormous power for their owners, and they almost certainly did in small-scale societies, too. However, the investigation of these issues requires archaeologists to acquire the ability to detect slaves in the archaeological record.

Material culture distinctive to slaves in small-scale societies is difficult to identify. While images of slavery bring to mind plantations with rows of slave cabins, in small-scale societies slaves generally lived in their master’s house, although they often slept in the least desirable parts. Furthermore, they were typically occupied with the same tasks as other members of the group. Wealthy and powerful individuals tended to own the largest number of slaves, and slaves might have freed the upper strata from quotidian labor. But since slaves worked in productive activities alongside non-slaves, it is difficult to distinguish their activities in the archaeological record.

Slaves are commonly discussed in ethnohistoric, historic, ethnographic, and other written accounts of small-scale societies, and these texts have been used as a starting point for archaeological identification of slavery in similar societies in prehistoric times. Common patterns in these accounts allow us to look for contexts in which captive-taking and enslavement might have occurred. In small-scale societies, captives were most often taken in raids or warfare, although one or a few individuals were sometimes kidnapped and slaves may have also been traded or sold from group to group. Worldwide, women and children were most commonly taken captive, as adult males were difficult to control and transport, and might pose a threat to the captor’s settlement.

These patterns allow archeologists to construct a series of expectations for the presence of slavery in the small-scale societies of the past. Evidence of warfare should alert archaeologists to the presence of captives and, potentially, slaves. Such evidence includes defensive sites built on high or otherwise inaccessible places; settlements surrounded by stout walls; empty “no-man’s lands” between groups of settlements; weapons of war; iconography (rock art, figurines, etc.) that shows violence; and trauma to human remains. Because cross-cultural studies have suggested that women and children were most commonly captured, skewed sex ratios in burial populations may be used to identify the presence of captives or the absence of people taken captive: more females may indicate groups that successfully took women, while more men might indicate a society that had been raided for its women.

Human remains provide the strongest evidence for slavery in small-scale societies. Slaves were subject to violence, and indicators of violence include cranial fractures, signs of trauma and pathology in various stages of healing indicating repeated beatings (called “injury recidivism”), and fractures to forearms (from warding off blows to the head or from violent falls), hands, feet, ribs, or leg bones. Injury recidivism identifies subordinate individuals who may be subject to frequent punishment. Blows to the head can cause neurological trauma that results in a diminished ability of the victim to control her actions, perhaps inviting further punishment.¹⁷

Slaves in small-scale societies were often foreigners to the societies in which they found themselves, captives from distant regions. Consequently, another place to start the search for slaves is by identifying non-local people. Isotope analysis provides one of the best ways of identifying human movement in the past. The two types of isotopic analyses most often used in studies of human mobility are strontium (⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr) and oxygen (¹⁸O). Different environments have different isotopic signatures, and as people eat and drink, these isotopes are incorporated into their bones and teeth. Tooth enamel is created between ages four and twelve, while bone is remodeled throughout an individual’s life. As a result, an individual whose bones and teeth have different isotopic signatures, or whose teeth have an isotopic signature different from the environment in which their body was found must have moved at some point in their life. Ancient DNA (aDNA) is also used to explore human movement in the past, but is most useful for identifying broad patterns of genetic ancestry rather than the movement of individuals.

Although material culture distinctive to slaves in small-scale societies is rare, other aspects of artifacts can help us to “see” captives. For example, at the fourteenth-century site of Grasshopper Pueblo in the American Southwest, an excess of females in the burial population has been interpreted as migrants fleeing war-torn areas to the north,¹⁸ although others have suggested they were captives.¹⁹ The burial population also included a much higher than normal number of children. Interestingly, non-local material culture at Grasshopper was female-linked, including pottery and hearth style. Male-linked material culture, including ceremonial architecture and projectile points did not change after the influx of migrants, indicating that males at the site were local.

A study of early twentieth-century artifact distributions along the Ucayali River in western Amazonia found that, while most objects (weapons, utility objects, clothing, ornaments, tools for body modification) became less common as the distance to their center of manufacture increased, a number of similar female-linked objects did not follow this pattern.²⁰ Instead, objects typically used by women were found in widely spaced tributaries of the Ucayali. These were not places likely to exchange women as marriage partners. The pattern is consistent with raiding for women. In other words, practices of artifact manufacture had been introduced to these remote regions by captive women. The presence of out-of-place female-linked non-local material culture at archaeological sites should alert archaeologists to the potential presence of captives.

Conclusions

The archaeology of slavery is a relatively new field but it promises to change our understanding of many cultures in the past. When we think of times and places in the past, whether a small tribal society in a remote landscape or an ancient state, like the city-states of Mesopotamia, we should acknowledge that some proportion of the people who made up these societies were marginalized, dependent, probably enslaved. We should envision these people as important actors in the societies of which they were a part. We know that in many times and places in the past, marginalized people not only made many of the tools, utensils, artwork, and more, but they also continued to handle, use, clean, and care for these objects. They used tools to build houses, shrines, temples; as well as to hunt or fish, manufacture canoes, process food, and dig irrigation canals. They served their master’s food on dishes that they may have made, painted the murals on the walls of the room in which the master dined, grew and transported the food that was eaten. They made clothing, even though they may have been denied substantial clothing themselves.

This injection suggests some of the avenues that archaeology is taking to identify slaves in the past, reconstruct their lifeways, and recognize the contributions they made to the societies in which they lived. In state-level societies, where slaves often lived and worked separately from their masters, finding slave houses and material culture is easier. Such studies have been especially successful in the American South and the Caribbean. But admittedly, for these places there is abundant textual and iconographic documentation of the locations in which slaves lived and worked. Such detailed descriptions of slave lives are lacking for ancient Greece and Rome, and archaeological studies of slave lives in these societies are, as a result, more poorly developed. Greater efforts by classical archaeology to explore slavery in the past may eventually open a new window to our understanding of slave lives in ancient societies.

In small-scale societies where slave lives are closely entangled with those of their masters, finding slaves in the archaeological record is difficult. Cross-cultural ethnohistoric and ethnographic accounts suggest that captives were most often women and children taken from other groups, so the identification of non-local people provides a starting place for finding marginalized or enslaved individuals. Slaves tend to suffer lives of violence, and studies of human remains can uncover such treatment. These steps allow us to begin to identify slaves in prehistoric small-scale societies, but scholars have yet to develop robust means of studying the lives they lived. Such studies should transform our understanding of small-scale societies that we once assumed were egalitarian.

Notes

• 1. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), vii.

• 2. Theresa A. Singleton, “The Archaeology of Slavery in North America,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 119–40.

• 3. Singleton, “The Archaeology of Slavery.”

• 4. Jane Webster, “Archaeologies of Slavery and Servitude: Bringing ‘New World’ Perspectives to Roman Britain,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 18 (2005): 161–79. Jane Webster, “Less Beloved: Roman Archaeology, Slavery, and the Failure to Compare,” Archaeological Dialogues 15, no. 2 (2008): 103–23.

• 5. Associated Press, 22 November 2020. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/remains-man-his-slave-unearthed-ashes-pompeii-after-almost-2-n1248541.

• 6. Hugh F. Thompson, The Archaeology of Greek and Roman Slavery (London: Duckworth, 2003).

• 7. Ian Morris, “Remaining Invisible: The Archaeology of the Excluded in Classical Athens,” in Women and Slaves in Greco-Roman Culture: Differential Equations, eds. Sandra R. Joshel and Sheila Murnaghan (London: Routledge Publishing, 1998), 193–220.

• 8. “Slaves’ Room Found in Pompeii,” The Past, 16 January 2022, https://the-past.com/news/slaves-room-found-in-pompeii/.

• 9. Thompson, The Archaeology of Greek and Roman Slavery, 242–44.

• 10. Thompson, The Archaeology of Greek and Roman Slavery, 238–40.

• 11. Elizabeth Fentress, “On the Block: Catastae, Chalcidica and Cryptae in Early Imperial Italy,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 18 (2005): 220–34.

• 12. Webster, “Less Beloved,” 103–23.

• 13. Douglas V. Armstrong, “Cultural Transformation Within Enslaved Laborer Communities in the Caribbean,” in Studies in Culture Contact: Integration, Culture Change, and Archaeology, ed. James G. Cusic (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998), 378–401.

• 14. Singleton, “The Archaeology of Slavery in North America,” 119–40.

• 15. Laura J. Galke, “Colonowhen, Colonowho, Colonowhere, Colonowhy: Exploring the Meaning Behind the Use of Colonoware Ceramics in Nineteenth-Century Manassas, Virginia,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 13, no. 2 (2009): 303–26.

• 16. Kenneth L. Brown, “Retentions, Adaptations, and the Need for Social Control Within African and African American Communities Across the Southern United States From 1770 to 1930,” in The Archaeology of Slavery: A Comparative Approach to Captivity and Coercion, ed. Lydia Wilson Marshall (Carbondale IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015), 166–91. Leland Ferguson, Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Early African America, 1650–1800 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992).

• 17. Debra L. Martin, “Ripped Flesh and Torn Souls: Skeletal Evidence for Captivity and Slavery From the La Plata Valley, New Mexico, AD 1100–1300,” in Invisible Citizens: Captives and Their Consequences, ed. Catherine M. Cameron (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press), 159–80; Debra L. Martin, Ryan P. Harrod, and Misty Fields, “Beaten Down and Worked to the Bone: Bioarchaeological Investigations of Women and Violence in the Ancient Southwest,” Landscapes of Violence 1, no. 1 (2010): art. 3.

• 18. Julia C. Lowell, “Women and Men in Warfare and Migration: Implications of Gender Imbalance in the Grasshopper Region of Arizona,” American Antiquity 72, no. 1 (2007): 95–123.

• 19. Warren R. DeBoer, “Wrenched Bodies,” in Invisible Citizens: Captives and Their Consequences, ed. Catherine M. Cameron (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2008), 233–61.

• 20. Warren R. DeBoer, “Deep Time, Big Space: An Archaeologist Skirts the Topic at Hand,” in Ethnicity in Ancient Amazonia: Reconstructing Past Identities From Archaeology, Linguistics, and Ethnohistory, eds. Alf Hornborg and Jonathan D. Hill (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2011), 75–98.