Slavery and Slave Trade in Early Medieval Bohemia: Archaeology of Slavery or Slavery of Archaeology?
2021
Abstract
This study analyses the phenomenon of people without legal personality in early medieval central Europe from two perspectives. The first is focused on the importance of unfree labour in the context of local economic systems, the second on the long-distance slave trade.
While according to written sources from the eleventh and twelfth centuries the unfree played a key role in the economy of the rulers and ecclesiastical institutions, the author argues that the role of the international slave markets has been overestimated in recent studies. Slavery, unfortunately, usually does not have specific correlates in the archaeological record and cannot be studied without textual evidence.