Captives - (Borderlands and Transcultural Studies) by Catherine M Cameron (Paperback)

About the Book

Catherine M. Cameron provides a detailed comparative study of captive-taking in small-scale societies and explores the profound impacts captives had on the societies they joined. Cameron's book opens new avenues of research about captives as significant sources of culture change.

Book Synopsis

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

Review Quotes

"Captives challenges archaeologists to broaden their scope of inquiry to recognize the temporal depth, geographical breadth, and nearly universal presence of captives in small-scale societies of the past. Catherine Cameron's comparative approach to captives lays the groundwork, methodologically and theoretically, for understanding the lives of captives, their social locations, and their significance as agents of change in societies of all scales throughout human prehistory and, indeed, into the present."--Brenda J. Bowser, associate professor of anthropology at California State University-Fullerton, coeditor of Cultural Transmission and Material Culture: Breaking Down Boundaries

-- (4/20/2016 12:00:00 AM)

"Captives is foremost an invitation to begin to see the past in a new way--to make visible individuals who have long been made invisible in archaeological interpretations but have nonetheless been there all along."cLydia Wilson Marshall, KIVA: Journal of Southwestern Anthropology and History

"Captives: How Stolen People Changed the World challenges archaeologists to consider captive-taking, an ancient and almost universal practice in human history, as a significant mode of cultural transmission
and a source of culture change. . . . Here Cameron provides a framework that enables archaeologists to investigate the nature and scale of the roles that captives have played in small-scale societies."--David H. Dye, American Antiquity-- (4/23/2019 12:00:00 AM)

"[Captives] could have a significant impact on archaeological studies."--Eric E. Bowne, Journal of Anthropological Research
-- (3/31/2020 12:00:00 AM)

"[Captives] is useful for scholars in many fields interested in the topic, for classroom use, and the public. It is a significant contribution to the topic of captives and slaves, which remains urgent as we struggle with our own national legacy of slavery, as well human trafficking across the world and down the street."--Kenneth M. Ames, Oregon Historical Quarterly-- (4/13/2018 12:00:00 AM)

"Cameron accomplishes exactly what she set out to do: opening up a new space for investigation and laying out an agenda for further research. . . . She makes it clear that Captives is intended not to be the final word but, rather, the opening salvo. Archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, and ethnohistorians should heed her call."--Matthew Kruer, Ethnohistory

"In this ambitious and learned work, award-winning archaeologist Catherine Cameron explores how violence against the few may transform the cultures of the many."--James Brooks, author of Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands
-- (2/25/2016 12:00:00 AM)

"This book will be an eye-opener for archaeology."--European Journal of Archaeology

"This is a well-written text. . . . Equally accessible to advanced undergraduate students and researchers, with a wide range of studies and well-structured approach to captives as social beings that are organized in a coherent manner throughout. It should be the starting point for anyone seeking to understand the various facets of captive-taking and the lives of captives in small-scale societies."--Liza Gijanto, Historical Archaeology-- (8/2/2017 12:00:00 AM)

"This moving book helps us understand: What was it like to be a slave? A slave-owner? How does slavery affect society? It demonstrates that archaeology--the social science of the past--can ask big questions about the human experience."--Michelle Hegmon, professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University and editor of The Archaeology of the Human Experience-- (2/25/2016 12:00:00 AM)

About the Author

Catherine M. Cameron is a professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is the author of Chaco and After in the Northern San Juan: Excavations at the Bluff Great House and Invisible Citizens: Captives and Their Consequences.