The chapter discusses the linguistic evidence for slaves and slavery in Proto-Indo-European, with the Latin lexicon as its point of departure. Slavery, as such, has proven to be quite an elusive field of investigation. Archaeologists in particular have been perplexed to find that, even in historical periods for which literary sources richly document slavery as a vital institution, the archaeological evidence is meager and ambiguous. In a sense, slaves are as invisible to archaeologists as they were anonymous and socially nonexistent in the societies that they helped build and maintain. One of the keys to the archaeologist’s problem is that, being possessions themselves, slaves tend not to own anything, and, given that they are not legitimate members of society, they are not likely to receive elaborate burials – to the extent that they are buried at all. However, there are other scenarios in which the material wealth of slaves was in fact similar to that of lower-class free individuals, rendering it impossible to tell the classes of free and unfree workers apart.
It is illustrated that, ironically, the historical linguist is faced with much the same challenges when it comes to reconstructing a lexicon for slaves and slavery. However, as is often the case, even silent sources can tell a story.