The Bioarchaeology of Captive-Taking and Enslavement

The bioarchaeological analysis of human remains provides a unique perspective on the past: an individual’s lived experience is literally encoded in bone, whether through disease, trauma, or cultural modification. These skeletal signatures constitute an independent dataset that allows exploration of past populations and reveal the ways in which captivity and slavery became embodied in the remains of people excavated from Europe and the Americas. The skeletal changes observed provide evidence for the impact of colonisation, the realities of captivity and transport, affiliation to natal locales, and the intergenerational consequences of the enslaved experience. Together, they serve to demonstrate commonalities in the embodiment of captivity and enslavement from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. This chapter explores how intentional dental modification can be used to investigate ethnic identities in Lisbon and St. Helena; how the bioarchaeological data from early colonial Cuba informs the funerary evidence and reveals the complexity of the lived experience of colonialism by Indigenous communities and forced-migrants to the island; the realities and intergenerational impact of transportation and enslavement in Barbados, focussing on lead poisoning and the consequences of plantation life, particularly for mother-infant dyads; and the use of osteobiographies to create powerful histories demonstrating how the legacy of slavery still affects contemporary populations in the nineteenth-century Dutch Caribbean.