Archaeological Approaches to Slavery and Unfree Labour in Africa

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Archaeological Approaches to Slavery and Unfree Labour in Africa," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The practice of capturing, exploiting, and trading humans has deep roots in the history of small and large-scale societies across the world, and continues to shape the lives of modern-day peoples. Slavery has been awarded much attention by scholars, and archaeology has played a vital role in highlighting experiences of enslavement. Archaeologists face major challenges however: the material culture of slavery is often ambiguous, leading to a dearth of knowledge about those institutions, places, and people that lack clear written or oral histories. Africa’s complex past has been fundamentally shaped by the capture and trade in enslaved people by both external and internal forces, and slaves would have played a significant role in past societies. Yet that past is most often understood through contexts outside Africa, particularly the New World. This symposium seeks instead to bring together scholars of slavery working across Africa, exploring how the formation of new and different methodologies can be used to investigate the role of unfree labour in the cultural, religious, and economic production of past societies, and how enslaved people negotiated and resisted their unfree status. This provides a comparative framework from which we can discuss archaeologies of slavery both within and beyond Africa.