Catherine Cameron's first page of Captives: How Stolen People Changed the World opens with Helena Valero's capture by Yanomamö raiders in the Amazon and the Chibok schoolgirls kidnapping by Boko Haram jihadists in northern Nigeria. What follows is a well-researched argument urging archaeologists to consider the importance of captives in the distant past and to identify captive-taking as an important mechanism for culture change.
In the first chapter, “The Captive in Space, Time, and Mind,” Cameron discusses the antiquity and pervasiveness of captive-taking through kidnapping, raiding, and warfare in small-scale societies. What follows is a review of the global scope of captive-taking, especially the selective taking of children and women. She also emphasizes the permeability of social boundaries and shows that the landscape of captive-taking entangles communities at varying social scales.
Data on captive-taking are derived from eight broad regions of the world. In Chapter 2, four regions in North America are discussed, along with other accounts from Africa, Europe, South America, and Southeast Asia. Identifying patterns common to captive-taking around the world helps in understanding the social lives of captives in small-scale societies. The patterns identified represent a first step in the recognition of captives as subordinate individuals, in addition to contributions made by captive persons to the formation and maintenance of social boundaries and practices in captor communities.
In Chapter 3, “The Captive as Social Person,” Cameron outlines the social positions captives may be offered in captor society. Here she provides a microscale examination of the ways in which captives may become incorporated into captor society and the social roles offered them. In addition, the characteristics of captured individuals may have a determinative effect on their ultimate social position, which may range from wife or adoptee to abject slave. The captor's assessment of whether “others” might be civilized or properly trained in captor social practices is particularly significant to the captive's social status and treatment.
Captives may have been an important source of power in the past. As aspiring leaders require followers and control over the labor of others, captives meet these social and political needs without the reciprocal obligations involved in demanding the services of kin. Captives were a potent source of power for their captors. Their presence and degraded condition emphasize the status and control exercised by their captors. In this respect, archaeologists should investigate the role of captives in the creation of complex societies.
In “Captives, Social Boundaries, and Ethnogenesis,” Cameron investigates the effects captives may have on the creation and maintenance of social boundaries. Captives may strengthen social boundaries by following captor cultural practices or by serving as reminders of incorrect behavior. Captives may reinforce social boundaries as they mix with unrelated people. Emphasis is placed on the fluidity of small-scale groups that continually break up and re-form in different configurations. In this light, Cameron cautions archaeologists to wean themselves from the view of social groups as entities with lengthy histories.
In Chapter 6, “Captives and Cultural Transmission,” Cameron argues that captives could introduce new cultural practices into captor societies. This chapter is especially important for archaeologists, who often lack adequate models for understanding how cultural practices move among social groups. She explores practices transported by captives across boundaries and uses situated learning theory and communities of practice concepts to evaluate how captives may become involved in captor technological production and other activities. Although identifying captives’ contributions in the past is difficult, archaeologists should begin to link them to cultural changes in the archaeological record.
In the final chapter, “Captives in Prehistory,” Cameron outlines archaeological avenues for identifying captives in the past. She discusses and summarizes the results of her study and suggests that broad-scale and cross-cultural methods are appropriate for beginning a conversation on the role of captives in prehistory. The next step is to use this general knowledge of captives in systematic examinations of captive-taking and its effects on particular societies and regions of the world. She effectively addresses the question: How might captive-taking and the presence of captives be identified in the archaeological record?
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. Often resulting from intercommunity conflict, captive-taking has seldom been discussed by archaeologists (but see Kenneth Ames, World Archaeology 33:1–17, 2001). 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.
