Captives: How Stolen People Changed the World

by Catherine M. Cameron

In Captives: How Stolen People Changed the World archaeologist Catherine M. Cameron provides an eye-opening comparative study of the profound impact that 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. 
 

 

Genres: History, Anthropology

234 pages, Hardcover

Published November 1, 2016

Reviews

[David Nichols · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cameron provides readers with a tightly-organized overview, well-grounded in ethnohistorical scholarship, of captivity in “small-scale societies” (2-3). Raiding, captivity, and enslavement were widespread social phenomena, appearing on every continent except Australia and Antarctica. Captivity performed vital functions in the societies practicing it. Captors primarily took female captives, whom they valued for their child-bearing abilities, but they also sought outsiders with scarce and valuable skills: sewing, metal-working, totem-pole carving, and cultivating exotic crops (like rice and sorghum). Captives also reified the “high status of their owners” (82). In an otherwise-egalitarian society, slaves provided living affirmation of hierarchy. They stood outside of established kin networks (they could become affines or parents, but never full kinfolk), so masters could use their labor without incurring reciprocal social obligations (103). Masters could trade slaves as “prestige goods,” commodities whose exchange increased social honor; some groups (like the early Irish) considered them analogous to money, and denoted land and other high-value assets in slaves. Owners also used slave labor to produce other prestige goods. Captives processed dried salmon in the Pacific Northwest, brewed manioc beer for the Peruvian Conibos’ “competitive feast[s]” (97), crafted ceramic ware in the Philippines, and tended horses for the Comanches.

The author argues that captives’ very captivity helped define the separate and corporate status of their captors’ ethnic group, vis-a-vis the nations on which that group preyed. I find this more speculative than other parts of Cameron’s book, and contradicted by some of her other observations. Captives could frequently cross ethnic boundaries, serving as translators and diplomats, as Juliana Barr noted for the American Southwest. They sometimes became the glue binding new, coalescent societies together: the Cowetas’ and Cussetas’ absorption of captives helped them coalesce into the powerful Creek nation, and the Athapaskan “Gathering of Clans” story may refer to the incorporation of Pueblo captives into the nascent Navajo nation (126-129). Captives seem actually to have made interethnic boundaries more blurry. The lines they did strengthen were intra-ethnic ones: the divisions between the elite, whose wealth and status slaves both produced and represented, and the non-elite but un-enslaved majority. If Cameron is right about the ubiquity of captivity (and I think she is), then class divisions are one of the first “advanced” social technologies that humans learn how to deploy. A depressing observation, true, but a necessary one.

[Christopher Dawson · Rating 4 out of 5]

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