Introduction
‘A hundred suspicions don’t make a proof, as the English proverb says, but that’s only from the rational point of view – you can’t help being partial’. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, Citation[1866] 2015.
Crimes and their punishment are constants in our daily lives. Except for those actively involved in criminality and those employed in its prevention, prosecution and/or the rehabilitation of those deemed criminals, both are normally only latent concerns. It is when impacted by them that crimes and their punishment generally come to the fore of our consciousness and practice, although politicians of whatever leaning are not averse to playing on individual and societal fears about the likelihood of such impacts and the severity of their consequences for both victims and perpetrators. As ‘social facts’ (Durkheim Citation1938), concepts and practices of crime and the ways in which they are punished can tell us a lot about a society, although not all scholars agree with Durkheim’s arguments that both crime and punishment are necessary and functionally useful components of social life. Nonetheless, and not surprisingly, such matters have been the object of considerable scrutiny by legal and cultural historians as well as anthropologists and sociologists (e.g. Miethe and Lu Citation2005; Jeroslow Citation2011; Pirie Citation2013; Rock Citation2002; Schneider and Schneider Citation2008; Smith Citation2008). Conversely, despite the latent presence of crime and punishment in everyday lives, archaeological studies of instances of crimes and their punishment, the material manifestations of judicial systems and what they may tell us about cultural differences and similarities in the social construction of crime in the past are comparatively rare, with most explicit discussions focusing on the contributions archaeological approaches can make to forensic science (e.g. Cox and Hunter Citation2005; Groen Citation2018; Hunter, Roberts, and Martin Citation1997; Shvedchikova, Moghaddam, and Barone Citation2021). This no doubt has much to do with the difficulties in detecting crime in archaeological records in the absence of alternative supporting sources, especially textual evidence. Equally, past emic perceptions of crime are much harder to discern than etic ones. For example, as Redfern (Citation2024) notes, gender violence in the past was often not seen as crime, despite evidence for such violence being visible in the archaeological record in some circumstances. Moreover, ‘what actually counts as violence is highly variable and context-specific, and if we struggle to find a uniform definition of violence in the modern world, then we are even more at sea when it comes to the ancient world’ (Campbell Citation2024, 114).
Here, Campbell is principally concerned with politically sanctioned violence (such as by state actors or some other authorized collective) rather than unsanctioned acts of violence perpetuated by an individual or individuals against members of their own or another society. While we may consider some forms of socially sanctioned violence in the past as qualifying as criminal behaviour, and some actually were in the eyes of contemporary actors, we should avoid projecting our sensibilities into the past. Yet, herein lies the core interpretive challenge – in the absence of additional evidential sources confirming specific actions were considered criminal, there is always the risk of misreading certain material traces through our own contemporary conceptualizations and definitions of crime and punishment. In a similar vein, illicit (against social norms) and illegal (against the law) activities also tend to be hidden and kept below the sightlines of authorities for obvious reasons. Their material expressions may thus be obscured and potentially mistaken for legitimate behaviour and hence possibly interpreted as such when addressed archaeologically (Hartnett and Dawdy Citation2013). Ultimately, deciding whether some material evidence represents the traces of a past crime or punishment may ultimately rest on personal judgements. As Dostoevsky’s character Porfiry Petrovitch (the principal investigator of Raskolnikov’s crime of murder) observes, in such situations ‘you can’t help being partial’.
Consequently, given the common problems of equifinality in archaeology, it has been historical archaeology that has shown greatest interest in these topics, probably because both crime and punishment are easier to explore through comparison with the documentary record and their material traces can be more evident—from prisons to courthousesFootnote1—and on more recent eras (Donnelly Citation2004; Smith and Reynolds Citation2013). Also, punishment acquired particular relevance and a peculiar character in many modern societies from the eighteenth century onwards, as famously argued by Michel Foucault in his book Discipline and Punish (Citation[1975] 1977) which examined changes in European penal structures from ‘monarchical’ or ‘sovereign’ regimes involving torture and public spectacles of punishment to the carceral model characteristic of our own era. With a stronger emphasis on punishing (and reforming) the soul, instead of the body, new institutions were born, such as prisons, reformatories, penal labour, and so forth, which have been extensively studied from an archaeological point of view, especially in Australia (a convict colony itself) and North America (Casella Citation2007; Gibbs Citation2012).
Foucault’s (Citation[1975] 1977) ideas on surveillance and the way power migrates from the edges of society to its centre (what Foucault referred to as capillary power), have also received widespread interest among historical archaeologists in different parts of the world. Some of the earliest applications of Foucault’s ideas and especially his theoretical engagement with Jeremy Bentham’s design principles for houses of surveillance or ‘panopticons’, for example, were in archaeological studies of early capitalism in New England (Leone Citation1995). Several studies of the spatial layout of slave plantations, from the Caribbean (Delle Citation2011; Singleton Citation2001) to Zanzibar (Croucher Citation2015) have made similar arguments concerning the positioning of the houses of plantation overseers and owners, as have numerous archaeological studies of prison and internment camp spatial organization (Casella Citation2008; McNutt Citation2019), and of other kinds of institutions aimed at imposing social control (Romero Citation2002; Piddock Citation2007). However, panoptic models have also been deployed for interpreting the spatial organization of landscape features in much earlier contexts, including Roman installations in the southern Judean Desert (Yekutieli Citation2006) and patterns of settlement visibility at the large pre-Columbian settlement of Cahokia on the Mississippi River, in the central United States (Pierce and Matisziw Citation2021).
In recent years, more attention has been paid to the archaeology of political repression, including mass killings and internment camps, a kind of archaeology that has seldom engaged with other archaeologies of crime and punishment (Funari Zarankin, and Salerno Citation2009; Myers and Moshenska Citation2011), and even examples of targeted genocide such as that instigated by the Nazis towards Europe’s Roma populations (Vařeka Citation2023; on reprisals by partisans, see; Košir Citation2020). Yet diverse forms of punishment have been explored for earlier periods as well. For example, there is an important body of archaeological literature on torture, capital punishment and postmortem treatment of criminal bodies and their performative role (Darling Citation1998; Reynolds 2009; Osterholtz Citation2012; Fredengren Citation2018), as reviewed below.
While punishment can be detected relatively easily, the same cannot be said of the crimes, whose existence can most of the times only be inferred indirectly, as noted above. There are a few exceptions, however, where inference of criminal behaviour is beyond doubt, even for premodern cultures. An excellent example is the case of a young man murdered and thrown into a Han-period shaft tomb in the Shiyanzi cemetery (China) 1,300 years ago (Zou et al. Citation2021). Originally believed to be a robber who fell into the pit, forensic analysis determined that he was actually killed and the pit used to conceal the corpse. The man had been attacked from behind and stabbed several times on the face and in the thorax. Several examples of apparent murder victims have also been inferred from Ancient Egyptian contexts, including a woman in Abydos who was apparently stabbed in the back with a knife, and a mummified head found in Thebes from a man who died from a blow to his head while he was asleep (Müller-Wollermann Citation2015, 229). For a historical context, one of the best documented crimes is the massacre of passengers and crew on the Batavia, a Dutch ship stranded off the coast of Australia in 1638. Mutineers killed some 125 men, women and children, some of whose bodies have been recovered in archaeological exhumations (Paterson and Franklin Citation2004).
Less dramatic, but more widely documented is the case of grave-robbing. This is generally understood as either a criminal or illicit activity, at least when it is conducted on burials with which there are perceived cultural or kinship links – not so much with those that are seen distant in religious, cultural or ethnic terms. We know that grave-robbing in Egypt or China was punished, and thus archaeological evidence of robbing can be seen as proof of criminal behaviour. A unique example of these kinds of activities comes from a site in Daraheib (Egypt’s Eastern Desert), where a cotton bag was found inside a looted grave with the jewellery that was robbed from the grave but, for some reason, never carried away by the robbers (Castiglione and Castiglione Citation1994, 21).
Crime and punishment, ritual and memory
In many prehistoric and premodern societies crime was subjected to strong ritualization. It is often believed that crime has defiled society and must be cleansed. Such cleansing can imply extremely brutal behaviour. The primary notion in such contexts is the belief in the need to punish a moral breach through the exertion of violence that is so extreme that it remains imprinted in collective memory for a long period of time. A good case in point is the massacre of Awatovi in 1700, when traditional Hopis killed the entire community who had converted to Christianity (Turner and Morris Citation1970).Footnote2 Massacres detected in the American Southwest for the late first and early second millennia CE, which show clear patterns of brutal behaviour, could be antecedents to the case of Awatovi: extreme violence as a punishment that creates indelible memory. Martin and Osterholtz (Citation2020) write of the ‘poetics of violence’ associated with these massacres, using a concept coined by the anthropologist Neil Whitehead (Citation2004) to define culture-specific performances of bodily punishment that are manipulated and transformed by social actors in ways that (re-)constitute the social and cultural order.
In prehistoric Europe, criminals were also subjected to ritualized violence (Green Citation1998, 181–183). The most famous examples are the bog body burials found across north-western Europe from Ireland to Norway, southern Sweden and the Baltic states. Here, while not all seem to have entailed bodily violence and changes are also evident to the way these bodies were treated over time (Van Beek et al. Citation2023), in most cases the difference between law and religion seems blurred, as individuals were probably sacrificed to gods, but the reason they were sacrificed may have been their having previously committed crimes or moral breaches. Bog bodies cluster in the first millennium BCE to the first millennium CE, but cases of ritual punishment involving torture and killing in European contexts can be detected at least from the Neolithic. An intriguing set of examples are the bodies of women who had evidently been strangled that are found from eastern Europe to north-eastern Iberia dating to between the Mesolithic and Middle Neolithic, with a great expansion of such incidences with the establishment of agricultural communities (Ludes et al. Citation2024). The repeated pattern indicates shared cultural norms and customary laws in distant territories, although precisely how such acts were understood at the time across this vast geographical space will always remain elusive. We can only speculate whether these women were killed because they committed acts seen as crimes (such as adultery), or were simply randomly chosen as scapegoats, or for other reasons.
Cases of individual killing in a ritualized context, nonetheless, do bring to mind better substantiated examples of the consequences of mistrust and scapegoats as encapsulated in the Ancient Greek pharmakos rituals (Green Citation1998, 182), famously elaborated in the figure of the homo sacer by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben (Citation1998). The pharmakos was burdened with all the evils of the community and then expelled, and often killed, to cleanse it (Eidinow Citation2022). The pharmakos itself was often innocent: if anything, it was the community that was guilty, having defiled itself by committing sacrilegious acts, which in turn had brought calamities upon itself. The pharmakos was at the same time the poison (loaded with evil) and the medicine. The figure of the pharmakos may explain much of the punishing that can be detected in the form of ritual killing throughout prehistoric and early historic Europe, including bog bodies. Ian Armit (Citation2011, 14) has argued that these individuals tend to show signs of preparation that would have deprived them of their individuality and created them as ‘“other” or less than human’ and ‘thus easier and more acceptable to kill’.
In some cases, the scapegoat or pharmakos is not a living being, but a dead person, as with the case of vampires. Deviant burials all over Europe in medieval and postmedieval contexts have been interpreted as ritually killed vampires, to which all sorts of heinous crimes were attributed (Gardeła and Kajkowski Citation2013). However, other evil beings could be seen as being incarnated in humans, not only vampires. As discussed by Petar Parvanov (this issue) with reference to so-called ‘deviant’ or ‘irregular’ burials dated to the medieval period in the Balkans, many of the challenges of attributing these to the outcome of punishment for various categories of crimes can be overcome by a close reading of legal texts from the same and earlier eras. In other contexts, it is also possible through ethnographic or ethnohistoric references to infer that a crime was indeed committed and punished. An excellent example is the case of the traitor exhumed by Sirio Canós-Donnay (Citation2021, 370–371) in Senegal. The excavation of a 17th-18th century context at the site of Payoungou yielded the remains of an individual placed in prone position with multiple perimortem traumas and tied hands and feet. This is the customary treatment for individuals who have revealed secrets that endanger the community. The interpretation of this particular context as evidence of punishment was made possible by oral tradition. Villagers recalled that the area was used for burying traitors and horses: the former being less than human, the later more than animals. Local lore also confirmed the position of the body and the tied feet and hands, and indicated that those who betrayed the community could not be killed by the use of a knife – the exhumed individual in this case was executed by a blow to the head.
Another site with likely evidence for the deliberate execution of individuals is the Archaic Period (700—480 BCE) cemetery at Phaleron, c. 4 km southwest of the Acropolis in Athens, where over 2,000 burials have been recorded. As early as 1915, the remains of the mass burial of ‘17 male skeletons bound to a plank with iron collars around their necks, wrists, and ankles’ were uncovered here (Lobell Citation2018, 52). At the time, these were interpreted as evidence for punishment by apotympanismos (a form of capital punishment similar to crucifixion) (Pelekidis Citation1916, cited in Chryssoulaki Citation2019). More recent excavations between 2012 and 2020 exposed a much larger sample of ‘atypical’ burials, including a group of 79 burials of adult males, each with their wrists manacled and lying in three long trenches (Chryssoulaki Citation2019). These date to the 7th century BCE and while it was originally hypothesized that the burials could have been people executed following the Cylonian conspiracy to seize political power in Athens, Ingvarsson et al. (Citation2019, 79) have concluded that ‘the observations from the field documentation neither validate, nor disprove the hypothesis that these individuals were captives and victims of the so called “Cylonian conspiracy” in the 7th century BC’ ,Footnote3 which again reveals the difficulties of explaining unambiguously the reasons behind archaeological traces of punishment (see also, Buikstra et al. Citation2024).
While bodily mutilations, decapitation and other forms of execution may have been motivated by diverse reasons not necessarily directly connected to punishment of criminality, and so must be interpreted cautiously and in acknowledgement of the ambiguity inherent in such evidence (Tung Citation2007). Occasionally, the coeval deposition of ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’ burials in general spatial proximity can facilitate comparison sufficiently to suggest the treatment of the latter might signal reversal of an individual’s status perhaps associated with punishment for a crime or social misdeed, as suggested for one of the two individuals recovered from a fourth century BCE Iron Age ring-barrow at Carroweighter, County Roscommon, Ireland (Tobin et al. Citation2022). As this study highlights, careful comparative analysis of different contexts and instances can lead to securer inferences concerning the judicial nature of such examples. This point is also illustrated in a recent study of decapitated bodies and prone burials from three Late Roman cemeteries excavated at Knobb’s Farm in Cambridgeshire, England. The excavations exposed a total of 52 bodies, of which 17had been decapitated (8 female, 9 male) and another 13 were buried in a prone position, as opposed to the more common practice of supine burial (Wiseman, Neil, and Mazzilli Citation2021). In terms of the demography of the burials, 15 were female and 21 male, and who ranged in age from infants to mature adults (45 + years), with the peak death rate by decapitation being among 25–45 year-old adults (Wiseman, Neil, and Mazzilli Citation2021, 126). In common with most other Roman-era decapitation burials in Britain, the decapitated heads were placed near the feet (n = 10), or elsewhere beside the lower body (Wiseman, Neil, and Mazzilli Citation2021, 138). While recognizing the challenges of attributing decapitation to punishment for a crime or crimes, through careful comparative analysis of the distribution and characteristics of other Roman-era decapitation burials, the authors present a case in favour of a judicial explanation for these executions rather than ritual, sacrificial motivations, while also arguing, more tentatively that this may also explain why so many prone burials were uncovered. As to the nature of their crime, the authors suggest, again on the basis of comparative evidence, that these punishments might have been enacted by the Roman army on a population with responsibility for supplying the army with grain and other food supplies and by inference for having mismanaged or misappropriated these supplies (Wiseman, Neil, and Mazzilli Citation2021, 153–63). Alternative interpretations are possible however, especially given that decapitated burials are common across Britain at this time, and the practice may have had ritual or symbolic significance for certain kinds of person. Decapitation was also a feature of Roman warfare and conflict more generally and as a form of intimidating local populations.
Examples of deliberate execution of individuals, either on a large scale as a single event or multiple times over successive decades and even centuries, as instances of ritually motivated or sanctioned punishments are also attested archaeologically in many other ancient and more recent contexts. While ritual executions are not necessarily seen as a form of punishment – for example, children sacrificed to the gods by the Inca and Mexica (Wilson et al. Citation2013) – in other cases, the idea of punishment is indeed present, as with war captives, such as those documented at Abydos, southern Egypt dating to the First Dynasty [c. 3078–2900 BCE] (Campbell Citation2022), and some of the recorded examples of trophy heads used in acts of display during the Wari empire (600–1000 CE) (Tung and Knudson Citation2008). Other examples are known. One such is that of Viking Age torture victims associated with the blóðǫrn (blood eagle) ritual reputedly involving the breaking of the victim’s ribs and extraction of the lungs. While the evidence for these practices has been a subject of long-running debate around the reliability of the textual sources and the ambiguous nature of much of the physical evidence, a recent review of the documentary sources, iconography and archaeological evidence, alongside a highly detailed forensic assessment of the anatomical practicalities of performing the blood eagle ritual (Murphy et al. Citation2022), makes a strong argument that these practices were at least physically possible, lending additional credence to interpretation of at least some so-called ‘deviant’ burials from Viking Age contexts in this light.
Spectacles of sovereign power
Ritual killing was a form of political and moral spectacle, in which the principles of social organization and its values were re-enacted. Such spectacles increased and became more elaborate under hierarchical political systems. While in small-scale or non-ranked societies the spectacle of punishment reinforced the community and warned about the dangers of breaching collective values or endangering the physical or spiritual survival of the group, in hierarchical formations, public punishment was put to the service of the leader or elite groups: an opportunity to exercise sovereignty, which is defined as the right over death and life.
Sovereign punishment is associated with different forms of materiality. To start with, we have artistic representations of punishment, which are common across early states, from Mesopotamian to Pre-Columbian polities, such as the Moche (Bourget Citation2006). Those punished by the king (rebellious subjects or external enemies) are typically represented in inferior positions, with bodies tortured, tied or dismembered. Examples from Ancient Egypt also include depictions of flogging, as on a relief from the tomb of Khentika at Saqqara, although most of these likely reference ‘a private coercion of subordinates, not an official penalty’ (Müller-Wollermann Citation2015, 233). Interpretation of the iconography deployed at these sites also has the potential gain some considerable insight into the more intangible cultural values and moral frames of these societies, as illustrated by Cecelia Klein’s exegesis of visual symbols of sin and punishment in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica (Klein Citation1990/1991). The aesthetics of punishment were taken to an even greater extreme by the Assyrians, who depicted scenes of impalement and flaying in the bas-reliefs of royal palaces (Bleibtreu Citation1991). Roman depictions seem rather restrained in comparison to those of Assyrians: stone arches made permanent the spectacle of power that was the triumphal parade, but they do not dwell on bodily punishment, nor can they be read as a warning but instead focus on the glory of the emperor. More generally. the explicit representations of punishment of war captives in many early states can be seen as part of a wider pedagogy of fear whose objective was not only to celebrate victory over external enemies, but also to discipline subjects. War provided the ideal scenario to deploy such pedagogy, which was extended through art after the conflict had ended.
Another sort of material evidence for the spectacles of sovereign punishment are the spaces dedicated to carry out the executions, including plazas and ceremonial complexes in the Pre-Columbian world as at the Late Moche Period (CE 600–850) site of Huaca Colorada, Peru (Swenson Citation2012), and Roman amphitheatres that were used occasionally (and aside from their primary functions), both for the damnatio ad bestas and for burning people alive (Chris Citation2013), or the Tarpeian Rock on the Capitoline Hill in Rome, the site of public execution for acts of treachery (see e.g. Thein Citation2015). Another important locus for public executions in early Imperial Rome (and likely originally used similarly during the Republican period), well attested in literary sources, was the flight of stairs known as the Scalae Gemoniae in the northern corner of the Roman Forum (Barry Citation2008), where both criminals and political prisoners (and sometimes also members of their families) were executed and their corpses displayed. As Barry (Citation2008) notes, the stairs and the area around them became sites of political contestation over imperial excesses of power and authority over Rome’s citizenry.
Despite the names of public execution sites being well-known in many parts of the world (for example, Tyburn in London), physical traces of gallows, guillotines and similar structures are remarkably rare. Important exceptions include the sites of Galgberget (Gallow Hill) outside Visby’s town walls on the Swedish island of Gotland and Slots Bjergby on the island of Zealand, Denmark. At the former site, the foundations of a larger circular structure, with three internal square, stone columns arranged in a triangleFootnote4 still survive. Excavations here in 2007–9 exposed two formal burials and the scattered bones of another 30–50 individuals, including those of adult males and females, and children. Based on artefacts recovered from the site and a single radiocarbon date of 1520–1580 CE, these likely date to the post-medieval era correlating well with the earliest written sources mentioning the use of an external execution site at Visby for those convicted of witchcraft (Widerström and Andersson Citation2012). At Slots Bjergby (excavated by Peter Glob and Harald Andersen in the 1940s), as well as several burials (including two decapitations), a cluster of three post-holes with stone settings were uncovered thought to mark the site of one of the gallows erected on the mound, along with various artefactual remains of which some may have belonged to those executed at the site (Anderson and Primeau Citation2012). Structural remains of gallows have also been reported for a few public execution sites in West Bohemia (Czech Republic), most notably on Šibeniční vrch (Gallows Hill) roughly 1 km southeast of Bečov nad Teplou and in the town of Horní Slavkov (although these were extensively, and inaccurately, ‘reconstructed in the 1930s) (Krček Citation2021). Well preserved remains of post-medieval gallows footings, in both cases consisting of a circular stone foundation roughly six metres in diameter and with associated inhumation burials, dating to the 16th and 18th century have also been reported from the sites of Liebenthal/Lubomierz and Reichenstein/Złoty Stok in Lower Silesia (Duma and Wojtucki Citation2012). Historical cartographic and toponymic research have also helped identify the location of other possible execution sites elsewhere across Germany (Auler Citation2012) and West Bohemia (Krček Citation2021).
Spaces for punishment are, however, ambiguous, as they were used primarily for other purposes – as in the case of amphitheatres. In medieval Castille, for instance, the main square was a space of socialization, commercial transactions and diverse spectacles of power. The only material indicator that the square was also a space of jurisdiction was the rollo de justicia, a decorated monolith. In front of the rollo, criminals were punished publicly, including by death. The use of specific architectures or places as spaces of punishment is known through literary evidence and artistic representations. The latter are particularly important in largely (or totally) illiterate societies and can appear in multiple formats, including portable objects such as ceramics (Pearce, Speed, and Cooper Citation2021).
Apart from representations and places, we have some material traces of bodily punishment. Crucifixion, the most terrible and renowned of Roman punishments, has been attested in different parts of the empire. For instance, an individual, called Jehohanan, was found in a tomb near Jerusalem in 1968 with the lower leg bones shattered near the proximal end and the calcaneus transfixed by a large iron. The right radius showed a scratch probably from another nail, thus indicating that Jehohanan’s four limbs had been nailed to a cross (Robison Citation2002, 28–29). More recently, evidence of crucifixion has been found in Britain when the remains of an individual were recovered in a rural settlement in Cambridgeshire with a nail through the heel bone. Inflammation of the limbs suggests that the individual had been shackled before his death.Footnote5 Also, for the Roman period, a case of impalement was documented in relation to the destruction of the city of Valencia (Spain) by Pompei in 75 BCE. Seven individuals were found with evidence of perimorterm violence, associated with the fighting. One of them, however, had had their hands tied to the neck and was subsequently impaled with a spear, after which he had his legs severed (Ribera i Lacomba and Galvez Citation1995). During the medieval and particularly postmedieval period, a new modality of execution was the breaking wheel: the felon was placed on a wheel and the limb and torso bones were broken. Archaeological evidence of such punishment has been recorded (Mazzarelli et al. Citation2019). Both the implement and the nature of the execution, which imply prolonged agony, had an obvious performative character.
Punitive amputation is exceedingly common across cultures and some archaeological evidence exists of such practice. One recent example is the discovery of several severed hands in the Hyksos royal palace in Egypt, which have been interpreted as the result of judicial practices, rather than military conflict (Candelora Citation2021; for other examples from Ancient Egypt, see Muhlestein Citation2015). In China, two elite tombs from the Eastern Dynasty (771–256 BCE) have been exhumed in which individuals have been found that were subjected to punitive mutilation of the lower limbs. In these cases, written sources allow us to interpret the amputations as a punishment for a felony (such as deceiving the monarch, fleeing from duties or stealing), rather than a therapeutical practice (Zhou et al. Citation2024). Both individuals survived the severing of their legs. Similar practices have been documented for medieval Europe. The cutting of feet and hands, of which there is archaeological evidence (Fernandes et al. Citation2017), is most often associated with robbery, but in European settings it is known to have been used to punish other crimes, such as currency counterfeiting (Zambrana Citation2010). Evidence of hobbling of victims by inflicting blows to their ankles is also reported from Pueblo sites in the southwest United States, such as Sacred Ridge in Colorado (Osterholtz Citation2018). Other widespread corporal punishments, such as castration or eye-gouging, rarely leave material traces. The instruments used for punishing or torturing, nonetheless, can provide important insights into concepts of crime and social understandings of power and punishment. Some of the best examples are related to slavery, such as Roman slave collars (Trimble Citation2016). For later periods, museum collections can provide more insight into the suite of artefacts associated with specific punishments, such as the collection of branks (scold’s bridle), jougs, sackcloths and repentance stools dating to the Reformation in Scottish museums explicitly designed to shame those, especially women, deemed by the Church to have been sinful and to punish them by disciplining their bodies (McCabe Citation2011).
Evidence of corporal punishment is more than proof of past behaviour. It is evidence of culturally-mediated understandings of the body, spirit and power. Corporal punishment made sense in traditional societies, in which the body and its metaphors are so important to understanding society, the cosmos and the self. Corporal punishment, which is always associated with the spectacle of power, also made sense in illiterate societies. Sovereigns, and authorities more generally, were able to deliver messages in a very effective and durable way by marking the bodies of those subjects that have rebelled or violated the law. In a sense, punished bodies became the materialization of legal codes, but with the difference that they were accessible and legible to the majority of the population. It is also not surprising that the focus on the body diminished as modernity progressed and that a greater emphasis was put on the soul (or mind) of the criminals from the late eighteenth century onwards (Foucault Citation[1975] 1977). This had important material repercussions, as punishment transitioned from the body to space.
Spaces of punishment
Zygmunt Bauman, following Lévi-Strauss, speaks of anthropoemic strategies to deal with those others that are seen as incurably strange and alien. Such strategies imply barring physical contact of any kind. Such emic strategies, when taken to an extreme, include incarceration, deportation and murder (Bauman Citation2000: 101). Spatial punishment, following this anthropoemic logic, can thus be carried out in two different ways: expulsion or confinement. Traditionally, the preferred form by far of spatially enforced punishment has been expulsion from the community, which, in the case of societies governed by kin, is equivalent to social death.Footnote6
Such expulsion, whether for political or other reasons, can take place in life but also in death (or both) (Redfern this issue, Parvanov this issue). Examples of deviant and marginal burials in Anglo-Saxon BritainFootnote7 and other places, for instance, at times occur in localities that were spatially separated from places reserved for ‘normal’ burial thereby further emphasizing the social marginalization of these individuals (e.g. Stirland Citation2009), while at other times existing cemeteries located beyond town or city limits were preferred, as in Renaissance Poland (Obtułowicz and Pokutta Citation2014).
At times, expulsion does not affect a single individual, but an entire community. From ancient times to the present, mass displacement has been used to punish rebellious groups or people that simply refused to submit, as in the Assyrian case (Na’aman Citation1993; Thareani Citation2019; Valk Citation2020). Such mass deportations have left archaeological traces in the shape of abandoned settlements or sites with a clear change in material assemblages: thus, deportees from Babylon in the Levant preserved their identity by clinging to cuneiform writing, Mesopotamian symbols, Babylonian names and pottery that echoed the forms and styles they used to produce in their homeland (Thareani Citation2019). While different reasons have been put forward to account for the Assyrian practice of forced population displacement, a punitive rationale, related to the idea of memory discussed above, was key (Valk Citation2020).
A more recent case of organized mass expulsion is the convict system in Britain, which displaced 171,000 citizens from Great Britain to Oceania, especially Australia, between 1788 and 1868. Although most of the convicts were petty offenders, there was an obvious class issue at stake, which makes it different from other historical cases of deportation. Perhaps uniquely in the world, a large part of Australia’s historical materiality has to do with punishment: prisons and work camps, administrators‘ and guards’ housing and the infrastructures created by the inmates (Gibbs Citation2001). Excavation of some of the spaces used to house convicts in colonial Sydney have provided insights into their everyday lives, in most cases demonstrating widespread material impoverishment, although some finds also point to imaginative repurposing of scarce materials and evidence for wealth differences between different convict localities (Starr Citation2015). More generally, the entire country can be considered a landscape of punishment (Gibbs et al. Citation2018), at least from the perspective of its earliest European settler community if not necessarily so from its Aboriginal inhabitants whose experiences, while certainly encompassing punishment have also encompassed dislocation, dispossession, segregation, erasure and genocide alongside long-term survivance, cultural resilience and counter-mapping (Byrne Citation2003, Citation2008).
As opposed to banishment, imprisonment is historically and ethnographically quite rare until relatively recently. In Europe, people could be confined in certain places, but prisons themselves were uncommon before the late Middle Ages. Thus, the Mamertine Prison in ancient Rome was not intended for long-term incarcerations, but as a temporary place of detention before the actual penalty was enacted. It was around the fourteenth century when buildings purposefully designed as civic jails began to be built in Italy, with spaces divided according to sex and social class (Geltner Citation2008). Life for inmates does not seem to have been harsh, as inferred from the fact that they were well fed and could keep relations with the external world (including business) and that no riots and few escapes have been documented.
In fact, mass incarceration as we know it today only became common in the West under the new regime of punishment inaugurated during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and famously studied by Michel Foucault (Citation[1975] 1977). The prison was one of many emic institutions born or expanded during the nineteenth century, such as the lunatic asylum, the reformatory, the native boarding school, the concentration camp or the forced labour camp (see D’Gluyas this issue, Michaut, this issue), as well as institutions used for the internment of paramilitary suspects and political prisoners, such as the notorious Long Kesh/Maze prison in Northern Ireland used during ‘the Troubles’ (McAtackney Citation2014). A particularly harrowing description of the spaces of torture and the physical marks inscribed on the building fabric is provided by Pedro Fermin Maguire and Denise Batista Costa in their account of the material legacies of ‘scientific torture’ in late twentieth century Brazil, that drew inspiration from tactics developed by the Central Intelligence Agency (Maguire and Costa Citation2018; see also Maguire, this issue).
State crimes
Seen from a contemporary perspective, it can be argued that states have always committed crimes: from the sacrifices of retainers in royal tombs to the murder of non-combatants in wars of conquest, as discussed above. However, most of these acts were not considered criminal at the time, which does not mean that some of them were not subjected to ethical discussion – and at times seen as morally transgressive. It was often the fact that they were committed by rulers that allowed such acts to be categorized as legitimate rather than as crimes – in the same way that incestuous marriage, universally considered a taboo, was accepted or even mandatory for rulers in some contexts. When particular acts were considered beyond the law or religious beliefs, they were regarded as individual, not state crimes. This was the case of Roman governors in Antiquity or Spanish viceroys in the early modern period, who could be subjected to trials after their terms in power, or the various abuses committed by Roman emperors. In this latter case, archaeological evidence of punishment is the damnatio memoriae: the erasure of their names from inscriptions and the destruction or defacing of their portraits (Varner Citation2004). The idea of the state crime as such, that is, a crime that involves the apparatuses of the state and is pursued with state aims not for purely personal gains or whims, is a rather modern one and is strongly associated with the emergence of representative regimes that are accountable to the people and subjected to the rule of law.
State crimes during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are simultaneously evidence of crime and of punishment. Most techniques of state repression were devised as mechanisms to punish those who were considered guilty, often on ontological grounds (as with Jews, Roma and native peoples). Yet the punishment itself can be regarded as criminal and was indeed massively regarded as such at the time (as discussed below). If the prison was the paradigm of punishment during the nineteenth century, that role would be taken by the camp in the twentieth century (Agamben Citation1997). Few issues have elicited more interest in contemporary archaeology than camps of any kind: prisoner of war, concentration, extermination, transit, classification, re-education and forced labour camps (Dragoman et al. Citation2023; Farstadvoll et al. Citation2022; Karski and Kobiałka Citation2021; Kobiałka, Kostyrko, and Kajda Citation2017; Myers and Moshenska Citation2011; Mytum and Carr Citation2012; Theune Citation2010). Most attention has been paid to crimes against humanity committed by states in the Global North. Much less attention has been devoted to those that took place in the Global South, even if camps and genocidal practices were first developed there. Early examples include the concentration and forced labour camps established by the British in South Africa during the Boer War, which have been the object of some archaeological research (Benneyworth Citation2020; Benneyworth and Verkerk Citation2024). Another example of collective punishment through camps that has elicited archaeological interest is the repression of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya (Moshenska Citation2024). Still, the largest majority of studies have focused on the Nazi regime (Sturdy Colls Citation2015): a diverse typology of camps has been studied with archaeological methods that allows us to know better not only the spatial and material strategies of oppression and elimination at work at the camps, but also about the prisoners’ daily life lives and forms of resistance (Carr, Jasinski, and Theune Citation2018).
One of the elements that proves that perpetrators of state crimes are aware of the criminal nature of their acts is the efforts they put into erasing the evidence. This is a field in which archaeological research has much to offer. Thus, archaeologists and forensic scientists have been able to document attempts to destroy incriminating evidence in Bosnia, where participants in acts of genocide destroyed mass graves and moved bodies to other graves to confuse investigators (Jugo and Wastell Citation2015). Yet the study of artefacts, bones and DNA allowed researchers to reconstruct not only the massacres, but also the attempts at eliminating the evidence. In Uruguay, López Mazz and his team could not find human remains in the mass graves that they exhumed, created during the military dictatorship, but they could document the marks left by bulldozers when the military destroyed the pits (López Mazz Citation2017). Another excellent example of attempts at erasing crimes and archaeology’s ability to document both the crimes and subsequent acts of erasure is provided by David Kobialka (this issue).
Illicit and covert activities
Even within the same broad social context in the past, as in the present, different practices may have been perceived differently as either illicit or legitimate by different actors (Hartnett and Dawdy Citation2013). Good examples being the movement of taxable commodities across national boundaries, i.e. the smuggling of contraband (Hauser Citation2008), and the production and/or distribution of a commodity outside state-controlled regimes governing their manufacture and sale, such as the illicit distilling of alcohol or smuggling of tobacco – both of which have the potential to leave distinctive archaeological traces (Given Citation2007; Willis Citation2009). Oftentimes, such activities were at least in part also acts of resistance against the imposition of taxes by colonial regimes or the state intended as much to financially penalize and discriminate against individuals perceived by authorities as unruly or otherwise hard to control, and as attempts to enforce a particular form of ‘legibility’ on their citizens (Scott Citation1998). In other cases, activities that are seen as illicit or illegal by the state or colonial regimes can be considered as perfectly licit and even socially mandatory by other actors: good cases in point are crop gleaning in northern China from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries (Pomeranz Citation1993), and cattle raiding in colonial Africa. A though usually portrayed by colonial authorities as an index of brigandage, cattle raiding was a perfectly accepted social practice among a diversity of African peoples. In such contexts, raiding was an essential component of intergroup relations and identity and status-building (King Citation2017). ‘While agonistic and disruptive’, as King (Citation2017, 623) notes, ‘raiding was not always antisocial or reflective of social ills. To raid cattle was to raid a web of social relations’.
Theft can also be a form of political action. This is the case of brigandage in Ethiopia (Caulk Citation1984), which has been practiced by disgruntled nobles and rebels as a form of fighting against established powers and to accrue wealth and political influence that may eventually lead them to the throne. Archaeological evidence of these brigands are stone forts located in remote parts of the country, from which they mounted their expeditions. Perhaps the best-known example of illicit activities perceived as licit by those who pursued them is Viking raiding (Wilson Citation1968) and the emergence of what Ben Raffield describes as ‘predatory landscapes’ (Raffield Citation2024). Raids provided men with resources that could be used to pay bridewealth and acquire social and political influence. Archaeological evidence of the predatory activities of Norsemen is plentiful in the form of hoards with riches coming from many parts of Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East. In the case of modern piracy, pirates were aware that they were breaking the rules and committing crimes, yet this does not mean that there was not a political stance behind their behaviour. Shannon Lee Dawdy (this issue), for example, argues that pirate landscapes need to be understood through the lens of ‘ecologies of freedom’, in which ecologically informed choices, dictated by an anti-authoritarian ethos, had ecological consequences. It is also important to distinguish here pirates proper and privateers, who held government commissions and were authorized to capture the merchant shipping of rival powers. The ambiguity of piracy is not new: in the European Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, different groups practiced sea raiding and individuals of aristocratic background could shift between merchant and piratical activities (Hitchcock and Maeir Citation2018; Ruiz-Gálvez Citation2005). Irrespective of the legal and political status of piracy, how can we detect it archaeologically? Hartnett and Dawdy (Citation2013, 41) enumerate several archaeological signatures: coastal fortifications, sacked/burned coastal settlements, specific kinds of vessels, hoards, heterogeneous cargoes, frequency of personal adornments, weapons, luxury items and drinking artefacts, and sequestered settlements catering to visitors.
Theft of one kind or another is also likely to have a deep history as a criminal or illicit activity, and it is equally likely that those who committed it were punished or socially sanctioned in some way. This can be detected archaeologically in amputations of feet or hands, as mentioned above. Ethnographic studies of small-scale, pre-industrial societies from work by Malinowski (Citation1932) among Trobriand Islanders on, moreover, equally attest to the fact that theft is not exclusively associated with the emergence of either urban societies or those with marked wealth inequalities (although its prevalence might be higher in these settings), and was quite possibly a factor in most societies in the past, as it is in present day societies.
A particularly complicated question is prostitution (see Ayán and Otero this issue), one of the covert activities that have elicited more archaeological attention (Yamin and Seifert Citation2019). The selling of sex has been considered licit, illicit or criminal in different contexts and periods and at times all three simultaneously. As opposed to other activities mentioned so far, it is more likely that prostitution be considered socially illicit but legal. What we most often find are restrictions on prostitution, limiting its practice to certain places, in certain forms or under specific rules. Such restrictions may have a material expression, such as specific areas in a city being devoted to the practice (Hartnett and Dawdy Citation2013, 42), where in turn we can find particular architectures associated with the trade. Ayán and Otero (this issue) demonstrate the relationship between brothel architecture and architectures of repression and confinement in the case of contemporary Spanish brothels. In fact, archaeology can show the terrible living conditions experienced by women, including substandard accommodation, cheap food, alcoholism or drug-addiction, and occupational hazards, including frequent disease and abortions (Voss Citation2008, 326; Yamin and Seifert Citation2019, 30–32). Abortions and infanticide are well attested under brothels, both from ancient and recent periods (Crist Citation2005; Faerman et al. Citation1998).
Other equally complicated categories of crime are begging and vagrancy. In England, the first statutes against vagrancy were passed in 1349, making it ‘a crime to give alms to any who were unemployed while being of sound mind and body’ (Chambliss Citation1964, 68), and were followed by other anti-vagrancy measures over the next two centuries, especially following an upsurge in homelessness after the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII between 1536 and 1541. More stringent legislation was introduced following the Industrial Revolution, as part of a trend towards pre-crime, pre-emptive policing, with Vagrant Acts being passed in 1821, 1822 and 1824 that among other things criminalized begging and rough sleeping, and which still form the basis of current anti-vagrancy legislation (Lawrence Citation2017). Measures such as these contributed to increasing differentiation between the ‘deserving and ‘undeserving’ poor, a growing secularization of charity (especially in Protestant countries following the Reformation) and the criminalization of poverty more generally. The post-medieval era also witnessed a steady proliferation of almshouses and workhouses in both Europe and colonial North America underpinned by new beliefs in the reformatory power of labour (Huey Citation2001; Spencer-Wood and Matthews Citation2011).
Labour and punishment
The idea that crimes can be repaid through labour is an ancient one and appears across a diversity of political regimes, from Antiquity to the present. The most demanding forms of work, such as mining and the construction of large infrastructures, was often carried out by slaves, who usually became so due to war or debt. During Hellenistic and Roman times, convicts were widely used in the most dangerous forms of mining, in the desert and in salt quarries. We know from Roman law that convicts were forced to wear chains and that the weight of these depended on the kind of sentence (metallum or opus metalli, the former being heavier). Women could also be condemned ad metalla (Millar Citation1984, 140). Camps have been documented that speak about the conditions of those who laboured under servitude (Blázquez Citation1981). Yet archaeology can also inform about the strategies for controlling prisoners. A study of mines managed by the Egyptian New Kingdom and the Roman Empire in the Sinai Desert has evinced a logic of surveillance, based on visual fields, roads and observation posts, creating ‘landscapes of total control’ (Yekutieli and Cohen-Sason Citation2010, 48) that are not that different from modern forced labour camps, although in this instance those working in the mines were not convicts. Punitive labour was not restricted to mines or the construction of large infrastructures, though: prisoners were also employed in cities for common jobs, such as bakers (Benton Citation2023).
No less terrible were the work and living conditions of forced workers under the Han Dynasty in Imperial China. The construction of the tomb of the Emperor Jing (157–141 BCE) ended the lives of thousands of convicts. Many of the bodies have been exhumed in graves next to the burial complex, some were chained and one in ten showed cranial traumas (Campbell Citation2014, 112). Convicts during the Han Dynasty suffered many humiliations: their heads were shaved, they were tattooed and had limbs amputated, experienced corporal punishment and died, usually of disease, three to six years through their sentence (Barbieri-Low Citation2007, 218–240). Forced labour in the past as well as in the present has often been just a protracted form of death sentence (Pollock and Bernbeck Citation2016; Starzmann Citation2015).
It is difficult, in fact, not to see the connection between these ancient forms of labour exploitation and modern ones. Humiliation, physical punishments, and terrible life conditions have also been part of the inmate experience in our times. These can be documented archaeologically, through architecture and objects (see Maguire, this issue). Hard life conditions explain the abnormal death rates at institutions of forced labour, which are several times higher than among the free population (Michaut, this issue). The main difference between ancient and modern forms of convict labour is ideology. Those who were sentenced through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were often so for political reasons. Labour was not only a way of making them helpful to society, but also a form of re-education, which is in tune with the biopolitical logic of the modern nation-state. This was also the case for non-political offenders and particularly minors (Michaut this issue; Cornec et al. Citation2022). The idea was that convicts could be redeemed, either on secular or religious grounds, through hard work and discipline. In the case of post-war Spain (1939–1952), the ideology of religious redemption was materialized in the crosses and chapels that occupied prominent places in concentration and labour camps. In the case of post-Civil War Greece, part of the re-education process involved making models of famous Greek monuments – a form of instilling nationalist fervour on the inmates (Hamilakis Citation2002). In the case of indigenous peoples, often cast as lazy and useless, labour was considered the best way of transforming them into civilized, productive citizens (Surface‐Evans and Jones Citation2020; Maguire this issue). Witness to the terrible circumstances endured by indigenous people, especially children, are the unmarked graves that surround many of the camps, reformatories and boarding schools (Whiting Citation2023).
Conclusion
There are stains, but not very noticeable; all covered with dirt, and rubbed and already discoloured. No one who had no suspicion could distinguish anything. (Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, Citation[1866] 2015)
Crime and punishment pose significant challenges to archaeologists, especially in relation to premodern contexts. Crime in particular is notoriously evasive. It is, in fact, easier to approach through the ways in which it was punished than directly, among other things because we cannot tell for sure whether a specific behaviour was deemed criminal or not – raids, for instance, can be a perfectly legitimate social activity. In the absence of oral memory or written accounts, it may be impossible to tell with certainty whether a particular past activity involving violence was actually categorized as a crime or even as a punishment (instead of sacrifice, for instance, or a licit economic activity). There is, in fact, the risk of projecting our modern sensibilities onto the past and thus obscuring our understanding of other societies.
At the same time, it is obvious that moral and legal transgressions existed even in the deep past and that they were punished in different ways, some of which left material traces. We should be aware of this and be ready to, at least, contemplate the possibility of crime and punishment in the archaeological record. It has to be taken into account, however, that formalized punishment of the kind that is materialized (in the guise of torture, execution, imprisonment or post-mortem violence), tends to be more common in state societies, which are generally more coercive, than in stateless ones, where banishment, payments in kind or special purpose currency and different forms of restorative justice are more common than physical violence or restrictions on freedom. Also, economic crime is typically more commonly found in societies with socioeconomic inequalities than in more egalitarian settings, and hence is often more prevalent under state systems.
In any case, archaeology has much to offer to the topic, as the articles gathered in the present issue, and covering examples from the Middle Ages to the present, demonstrate. A long-term perspective on crime and punishment, in fact, reveals important differences in prehistoric, historic and contemporary societies, both in terms of ideologies and materialities. Thus, in premodern and early modern cultures, spectacle was consubstantial to punishment, whereas in contemporary times there is a tendency towards seclusion and concealment. Traditionally, it is through spectacle that law and moral knowledge are internalized. The role of punishment is as much to perform justice as to create indelible memories, especially when it comes to exceptional moral breaches. In the absence of textual forms of encoding information, non-literate societies resort to materiality and material behaviour to create such memories.
Being highly ritualized, as any other form of politico-religious spectacle, punishment leaves clear traces in the archaeological record: human sacrifices, specific forms of burial, and antemortem and post-mortem treatment of human remains, including amputations and torture. In premodern state societies, such spectacle usually had a strong spatial dimension: architectures were created to perform punishments which were, at the same time, manifestations of sovereign power – the most obvious case are Roman amphitheatres.
Paradoxically, the tendency to conceal punishment has not meant fewer or less visible archaeological remains, but the opposite: from the nineteenth century onwards, the material culture of punishment has grown exponentially and diversified: prisons, reformatories, concentration camps, mass graves. This, along with their relevance to present societies, explains the weight of historical and contemporary archaeologies on this field of study, which are well represented in the current issue.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the editor, Sarah Semple, and other members of the Editorial Board for their helpful and constructive comments on an earlier draft of this Introduction. Any remaining errors and misunderstandings are our own.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
