Warfare, Captive-Taking, Enslavement, and the Creation of Power

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Warfare and the Origins of Political Control " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Raiding and captive-taking were common activities in small-scale societies prior to the modern era. A majority of captives were women and children; some were enslaved while others were incorporated into the societies they joined. Ethnohistoric accounts make it clear that regardless of their social position, captives created power for the individuals who held them. Captives are followers and in small-scale societies, the more followers an individual had the greater their social power. Captives were also a labor force that could be put to producing food or goods for trade, a source of economic power for the individuals who held them. Captives themselves were high-value trade items (often the highest) and were widely exchanged among small-scale and more complex societies. Captives could clearly create power for their owners, but in which situations were they key to the development of complex societies? Of course, not all societies that held captives became complex, but some did. This paper uses ethnohistoric and other data to explore the role of captives in the development of state-level societies and suggests some circumstances in which their presence was central to this transformation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Warfare and the Origins of Political Control   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35674.0