ABSTRACT

The current state of archaeological research about slavery in Africa faces the challenge of recognising the existence and grasping the meanings of slaving practices from times without written records. These challenges translate into methodological difficulties as to how to identify the material signatures of slavery without having recourse to a pre-established, and therefore static, definition of slavery. Building on the contributions of archaeologists, historians and linguists, this article explores how Proto-Luban speakers, an ancient speech community belonging to the Bantu linguistic family, conceptualised slavery and might have used enslaved individuals in ritualised sacrifices to placate or please ancestors during the burial of powerful individuals in the Upemba Depression of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The reconstructed lexicon of the language once spoken in the area suggests that the process of killing individuals involved the reinterpretation of a durable set of meanings related to slaving practices in Central Africa as social actors responded to important changes in social and political life. The paper suggests that the method of direct association between archaeological and linguistic evidence allows scholars to shed new light on the antiquity of both slavery and human sacrifice among Proto-Luban speakers during the early second millennium AD.

摘要

非洲有关奴隶制的考古学研究现状面临着挑战，即从没有书面记录的时代开始认识奴隶制的存在并掌握奴隶制的含义。这些挑战转化为方法上的困难，即如何在不依靠预先建立的，因而是静态的奴隶制定义的情况下，识别奴隶制的物质特征。本文以考古学家，历史学家和语言学家的贡献为基础，探讨了原始鲁班语的讲者，属于班图语系的一个古老的言语社区，概念化的奴隶制，以及在葬礼期间可能使用奴役的人进行仪式化的牺牲来安抚或讨好祖先刚果民主共和国乌彭巴大萧条中的强大人物。曾经在该地区使用过的重建语言词典表明，在社会行为者对社会和政治生活的重要变化做出反应时，谋杀个人的过程涉及对与中非奴役做法有关的持久含义的重新解释。该论文提出，考古学和语言学证据之间直接联系的方法使学者们能够对公元二千年初期的原始鲁班语讲者的奴隶制和人类牺牲的古代有了新的认识。