In other words, the material presence of enslaved persons in the archaeological record is typically slight. Most obviously, as individuals and a social class with minimal rights and limits to the exercise of their own agency, enslaved persons commonly lack much in the way of personal possessions and access to other material expressions of their own identity, and what material culture traces they do leave are often insubstantial and highly ephemeral. The identification of enslaved individuals from archaeological evidence alone can be challenging. 1365), help supplement these geographies, providing information on the legal status of enslaved persons, processes of manumission, and the rights of freed slaves. Other documentary sources, including various legal documents and texts on Islamic jurisprudence, such as the Risāla of Ibn Abī Zayd al-Qayrawānī (922-996) and the Mukhtaṣar of Khalīl ibn Isḥāq al-Jundī (d. the use of slaves as part of a standing army, also seems to have been common, and several early states, especially the Middle Nile kingdoms, relied on slave soldiers obtained from farther south through trade and raiding expeditions. While the presence of enslaved individuals and their trade at any particular locality or during a specific century are rarely discussed in detail in these texts, in combination they testify to the existence and importance of the use of slaves as agricultural labourers, house servants, entertainers, and concubines, and in artisan industries and mineral extraction across much of North Africa and in the Sudanic belt south of the Sahara during the Medieval era. Interpretation of these different kinds of sources requires different approaches, and recognition that each has its own limitations as well as potentials, and all are subject to different kinds of biases. These documentary materials can also be supplemented by archaeological data, including evidence (such as genetic and isotopic signatures) recovered from scientific analysis of human remains recovered from excavations, and occasional iconography, maps, and other visual material. The range of written sources for understanding the nature of enslavement and slave trading across Medieval Africa are relatively limited, with various itineraries and related accounts compiled by Arab geographers and other scholars providing the bulk of these. Also, violent capture and translocation to distant lands was not the only route to enslavement, as criminals, victims of famines, and other impoverished individuals were at times also enslaved either as a punishment or as a means to escape poverty and starvation. At times, they even occupied important positions within society more generally-the slave elites of the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt in the thirteenth century, being a case in point. It is important, though, to recognise that enslavement on the continent took many forms, and that while the treatment of enslaved individuals could be as brutal and devastating as anything documented on slave plantations in the Americas, in certain contexts enslaved individuals were well-treated and at times rose to have considerable social prominence within particular households.
Consequently, understanding the origins of these practices and their transformations over time is as important for understanding later developments as it is for reconstructing the deeper history of the continent. In some areas, these traditions of enslavement and human trafficking helped enable subsequent exploitation of Africa as a source of unfree human labour. There is a long history of enslavement and the trading of enslaved individuals on the African continent prior to the upsurge in European and other external involvement after ca.
0 kommentar(er)
