Hidden People in the Past: Honoring the Scholarship of Debra Martin

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Debra L. Martin" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Because archaeologists use ancient material culture to reconstruct the lives of people in the past, they tend to find those people with the most abundant and well-preserved property. Only the past few generations of archaeologists have looked beyond large settlements and monumental buildings to investigate common people. But just like today’s societies, those in the past were made up of the rich and poor, prominent and insignificant, and the truly marginal. Fifteen years ago I began to study one of the most marginal of ancient people: captives taken in raiding and warfare. Using ethnographic and ethnohistoric records I discovered a class of people largely unstudied by archaeologists. But how to find these people in the past? I realized that Dr. Debra Martin had, using bioarchaeological methods, developed robust analytic tools to “see” captives and other marginalized groups in the archaeological record. This paper explores recent developments in the study of captives and focuses especially on how the scholarship of Debra Martin and her students has formed a critical grounding to this work.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Debra L. Martin   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 30902