En bok som tar upp nordeuropeiskt slaveri i ett bredare perspektiv
The Archaeology of Slavery in Early Medieval Northern Europe
The Invisible Commodity (2020)
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/ ... 2#overview
This volume is the first comprehensive study of the material imprint of slavery in early medieval Europe. While written sources attest to the ubiquity of slavery and slave trade in early medieval British Isles, Scandinavia and Slavic lands, it is still difficult to find material traces of this reality, other than the hundreds of thousands of Islamic coins paid in exchange for the northern European slaves. This volume offers the first structured reflection on how to bridge this gap. It reviews the types of material evidence that can be associated with the institution of slavery and the slave trade in early medieval northern Europe, from individual objects (such as e.g. shackles) to more comprehensive landscape approaches.
The book is divided into four sections. The first presents the analytical tools developed in Africa and prehistoric Europe to identify and describe social phenomena associated with slavery and the slave trade. The following three section review the three main cultural zones of early medieval northern Europe: the British Isles, Scandinavia, and Slavic central Europe. The contributions offer methodological reflections on the concept of the archaeology of slavery. They emphasize that the material record, by its nature, admits multiple interpretations. More broadly, this book comes at a time when the history of slavery is being integrated into academic syllabi in most western countries. The collection of studies contributes to a more nuanced perspective on this important and controversial topic. This volume appeals to multiple audiences interested in comparative and global studies of slavery, and will constitute the point of reference for future debates.
Written sources from the early Middle Ages frequently report enslavement and slave trade in
northern Europe. The evidence, abundant and unequivocal, indicates the great importance of this form of unfreedom for social structures and the economy, and sheds light on the forms of violence and oppression associated with it. But written sources, by nature fragmentary, illuminate only some aspects of the phenomenon of slavery and leave many questions unanswered. It is therefore tempting to supplement them with archaeological finds. This raises, however, a number of methodological problems, given that enslavement, slave trade, and slave holding leave few, if any, unambiguous material traces. They can be easily missed when looked at it in isolation; but when combined with the results reached by historians, natural scientists, or linguists, archaeological evidence can provide important insights into this “dark side” of the early medieval economy. To address this methodological challenge, comparative and interdisciplinary approaches offer the most secure way forward. This was the starting point of the session organised by the editors at the 20th Annual Meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists in Istanbul, Turkey (10–14 September 2014). It brought together archaeologists, historians, and researchers from neighbouring fields interested not only in slavery in early medieval northern Europe – i.e., the area from the British Isles to Scandinavia to the central and eastern parts of the continent – but also in other geographical areas and in other periods. This comparative perspective is reflected in this volume, which is based primarily on the papers presented in Istanbul. The contributions take different approaches, reach varied results, and often offer divergent interpretations. They not only shed light on many aspects of early medieval slavery, but also grapple with methodological issues related to the paradox summarised in the title of this volume, namely how to trace the “invisible commodity” in the material evidence.