While slavery of any sort was a fairly unusual institution among indigenous peoples of the Americas, some of these distinctively Amerindian features were shared, at least in their broad outlines, across much of the continent, including the tropics, where the earliest Spanish sources document local forms of slavery back to the fifteenth century AD. The Brazilian anthropologist Fernando Santos-Granero has coined a term for Amerindian societies that possessed these features. He calls them ‘capturing societies’
