Swahili (Other Keyword)
1-12 (12 Records)
The Swahili coast, stretching from Somalia to Mozambique, has a long history of engagement in western Indian Ocean trade, from at least the first century CE according to documentary evidence. One result is the widespread use of animals of Asian origin – particularly zebu cattle (Bos indicus) and chicken (Gallus gallus) – in African subsistence systems today. However, tracing these animals’ arrival and spread is complicated by their osteological similarities to indigenous taxa and by poor...
Comparative Evidence of Maritime Activity in the Early Swahili Harbours of Zanzibar (2018)
The Swahili of East Africa are regarded historically as a maritime culture, whose coastal sailing networks and prosperous Indian Ocean trade connections can be dated back to at least the 7th century CE. Archaeological investigations have demonstrated that maritime elements were deliberately embedded in the architecture of the famous second millennium Swahili stonetowns, but a focus on urban areas has sometimes been at the expense of areas of potential maritime infrastructure within settlements,...
Cosmopolitan to Different Degrees: Daily Engagement with Maritime Culture at Swahili Towns at the Turn of the 16th Century (2016)
One of the most important developments from the past couple of decades towards understanding the history of the East African coast has been an appreciation of diversity among Swahili communities. Those communities each experienced the broad trends and developments that have been used to characterize Swahili history, but their experience of those trends was not uniform. This paper explores such diversity towards the end of the Swahili florescence at the turn of the 16th century, drawing on recent...
The Fortified Settlement of Pujini and Implications for a Swahili Urban Landscape (2015)
During its lifespan from the mid-fifteenth to early sixteenth century AD, the fortified settlement of Pujini shared Pemba Island, Tanzania with numerous, undefended, more typical Swahili settlements ranging from earth-and-thatch hamlets to stone-built urban centers. The site expresses a unique combination of qualities on the Eastern African coast: complex ramparts around nearly two hectares of space, in which stood some dozen domestic and special-purpose features. Archaeological evidence from...
Islamic consumption networks of the western Indian Ocean (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Islamic material culture", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Patterns of production and use of ceramics in eastern Africa offer a window into practices of consumption. Islamic glazed ceramics, originating in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, are the most plentiful evidence for trade networks and the accumulation of wealth from trade in coastal East Africa from c. AD700 onwards. Locally produced earthenwares suggest...
Local Earthenware Ceramic Decoration and Cultural Transformation on Kenya’s Swahili Coast, AD700-1700 (2015)
Description of locally produced earthenware ceramic assemblages excavated from Swahili town sites on the Kenyan coast suggest that incised and impressed decoration became less common and less formally complex, particularly on cooking vessels, after AD 1200 (Chittick 1984; Horton 1996; Wilding 1989). This development appears to be contemporaneous with shifts in consumption practices, domestic architecture, religion, and the importance and expression of socio-economic identity within coast town...
Long-Term Settlement in Plantation Regions of Unguja, Zanzibar (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, I discuss the results of an archaeological survey conducted in 2019 in north-central Unguja, Zanzibar. The aim of the survey was to investigate the long-term settlement history of regions that were transformed in the nineteenth century by Omani landowners who developed an agricultural export economy using a labor force of enslaved East Africans....
Modeling Socioecological Transformation in Coastal East Africa: A Case Study from Unguja Island, Zanzibar, Tanzania (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Islands around Africa: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists in the Pacific have viewed islands as “laboratories” for studying social, agricultural, and ecological transformations. Can a similar approach be applied to the near-shore island environments of coastal East Africa, and what might island case studies contribute to broader anthropological understandings of East...
Mortuary Archaeology of Burials from Two Swahili Stone Towns, Mtwapa and Manda, Dated to Circa 1600 CE. (2015)
Two ancient Kenyan Swahili sites were excavated over the course of five field seasons, from 2008-2012. Mtwapa (ca. 1000-1750 CE), located on the southern coast of Kenya, and Manda (ca. 800-1600 CE), located on the Northern coast, were once wealthy cosmopolitan polities involved in the Indian Ocean trade network. Both towns had populations of 5,000-10,000 at their height of occupation, and contained large central mosques. Mtwapa excavations occurred between 2008 and 2011 and produced a minimum...
On The Margins Of The Indian Sea Trade. (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "In Small Islands Forgotten: Insular Historical Archaeologies of a Globalizing World", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Swahili society was formed in the East African coast during the late First Millennium AD, developing a complex urban culture thanks to its partnership in the slave, gold, ivory, and mangrove and ebony wood trade between the Middle and Far East and Eastern Africa. Although the role of...
Preliminary Results of Geoarchaeological Sampling and Survey to Investigate Landscape History in Northern Unguja, Zanzibar (2017)
We present the preliminary results of a study investigating long-term agricultural history in northern Unguja, the southern island of Zanzibar. In the summer of 2016, we excavated four test pits in modern rice fields to collect bulk, starch, phytolith, C14, and micromorphology samples, as well as samples from upland areas along watersheds, with the aim of characterizing contemporary and ancient land use in the rice-growing western side of the island. We also carried out brief archaeological...
Zanzibar Before the Transnational Storm: Considerations of the Uneven Stops and Starts of the Colonial Project (2018)
Much recent scholarship has addressed the uneven nature of the colonial project. Metropoles are no longer theorized as monolithic fonts of culture or centers of political power. Likewise, the dynamism and influence of peripheries are topics enjoying intense archaeological investigation. This paper builds on such scholarship by exploring the fits and starts as well as the failures associated with early colonialism. In so doing it provides a stark contrast between the tenuousness of early...