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22 - Hiding in Plain Sight? The Enigma of the Linguistic Remains of Prehistoric Slavery

from Part V - Kinship Systems, Marriage, Fosterage, Free, and Unfree

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 April 2023

By
Benedicte Nielsen Whitehead
Edited by
Kristian Kristiansen ,
Guus Kroonen  and
Eske Willerslev
Kristian Kristiansen
Affiliation:
Göteborgs Universitet, Sweden
Guus Kroonen
Affiliation:
Universiteit Leiden
Eske Willerslev
Affiliation:
University of Copenhagen
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Summary

The present chapter discusses the linguistic evidence for slaves and slavery in Proto-Indo-European, with the Latin lexicon as its point of departure. Slavery, as such, has proven to be quite an elusive field of investigation. Archaeologists in particular have been perplexed to find that, even in historical periods for which literary sources richly document slavery as a vital institution, the archaeological evidence is meager and ambiguous. In a sense, slaves are as invisible to archaeologists as they were anonymous and socially nonexistent in the societies that they helped build and maintain. One of the keys to the archaeologist’s problem is that, being possessions themselves, slaves tend not to own anything, and, given that they are not legitimate members of society, they are not likely to receive elaborate burials – to the extent that they are buried at all. However, there are other scenarios in which the material wealth of slaves was in fact similar to that of lower-class free individuals, rendering it impossible to tell the classes of free and unfree workers apart. For overviews of the complexities of slavery in the field of archaeology, see, for instance, Marshall (2016: 69) and Morris (2018).

Type
Chapter
Information
The Indo-European Puzzle Revisited
Integrating Archaeology, Genetics, and Linguistics
 , pp. 308 - 326
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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