Ambiguity and contradiction in the archaeology of slavery

Extract

Jane Webster has made an eloquent and compelling case for writing slavery – and other forms of unfree labour – back into the historiography of the Roman world. Her argument weaves together questions of the nature of evidence, the principles of comparative study and the politics of disciplinary practice. My own concern has been with the archaeology of European colonialism and the postcolony in South Africa, several oceans and more than a millennium away from the Roman world (Hall 1992; 1999; 2000). Webster bridges this divide through a direct question: ‘it would be interesting to know whether Hall himself would feel that the “fact of slavery” . . . might generate recognizably similar material statements among other slave-owning peoples in other periods, including ancient ones’ (p. 112). This is to respond to this question, and to tease out some of the provocative implications in Webster's sense of the possibilities inherent in a wider archaeological frame of enquiry.