Indian Ocean (Other Keyword)
1-13 (13 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Current Research on Ancient Glass around the Indian Ocean" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Glass—and particularly the glass bead—was a common commodity of Indian Ocean trade, beginning as early as the mid-first millennium BCE and continuing through the second millennium CE. While existing elemental and isotopic analyses of glass beads recovered from outside India have identified glass production recipes likely from...
Anthropogenic plant translocations in the western Indian Ocean: Archaeobotanical perspectives on the Anthropocene from Madagascar and the Comoros (2016)
Although Madagascar is probably best known for its unique endemic flora and fauna, humans have also played a key role in shaping biological diversity on the island. Indeed, it is estimated that humans have been responsible for the introduction of some 10% of Madagascar’s flora in the centuries since the island was first colonised. For many of these plants, the precise dates of introduction are unknown; and while many are undoubtedly relatively recent introductions, a number are suggested to have...
The Archaeology of Mauritian Indentured Labor: Social Life and Death (2018)
This paper provides a comparative case study for archaeological studies of slavery and indenture. I investigate the 19th century landscape and material culture of indentured laborers on the Bras d'Eau sugar estate in northeastern Mauritius, Indian Ocean. After emancipation, indentured laborers lived and worked within the same physical plantation landscapes as the enslaved individuals who came before them. However, Asian indentured laborers in Mauritius were immigrants and migrants: one-third...
A Comparison of the Glass Bead Trade at Unguja Ukuu and Kizimkazi Dimbani, Zanzibar (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Current Research on Ancient Glass around the Indian Ocean" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Unguja Ukuu (sixth–eleventh cenuries CE) and Kizimkazi Dimbani (twelfth century CE) are early trading sites on Zanzibar, an island off the coast of Tanzania in eastern Africa. Here we investigate patterns of glass bead trade at these sites, examining continuities and change between sites and over time. Glass bead samples from...
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...
Ecological and Cultural Impacts of Colonialism on Mauritius (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. The colonization of Mauritius exemplifies the role played by humans in altering the ecosystems of remote islands. Previously uninhabited, it now has the highest population density of any African nation, and despite scant natural resources, also has one of the continent’s highest GDPs. Mauritius serves as an ideal case study...
Entangled Pasts and Futures: Historical Archaeologies in and of the Indian Ocean (2015)
This paper explores new approaches to conducting archaeology and making histories in and of the Indian Ocean. First, it outlines previous practices and uses of archaeology in the region. Secondly, it suggests "questions that count" as avenues to re-representing aspects of communities and their entanglements across this aquacentric space and through time. In part, we employ more recent pasts and sources to unveil deeper histories with contemporary implications for this cosmopolitan region and its...
The Glass Beads of Songo Mnara, Tanzania (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Current Research on Ancient Glass around the Indian Ocean" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological site of Songo Mnara lies on a small island of the same name just to the south of Kilwa Kisiwani in Tanzania. It was occupied mainly in the fifteenth century CE and its assemblage of 7,444 glass beads provides us with a unique view into Indian Ocean trade to East Africa in this period. A comprehensive study of...
Makak: Between History and Heritage (2015)
This paper examines a "mythic" settlement named Makak, located at the edge of Le Morne Cultural Landscape, a World Heritage Site, in Mauritius. A recent ethnohistoric study, conducted in collaboration with Mauritian colleagues used an array of oral, written, and material evidence to show that Makak is an informal place name for an area first settled by French colonists in the 1700s, then by several prominent "Free Colored" families in the 1800s, and finally depopulated as residents were forcibly...
The Maqamat Ship: Context and Comparison of the Iconic Arab Manuscript Painting (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology in the Indian Ocean" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The iconic ship illustration in the thirteenth-century Paris 'Schefer' Maqamat manuscript is one of the most significant individual images used in maritime archaeology. This painting was the primary iconographic source for interpretations of the Belitung wreck and for the design and construction of two full-sized replica ships, and...
Silences and Mentions in the Historical Archaeology of the Indian Ocean: Themes for a New Research Agenda (2015)
Research on the archaeology of the last five hundred years around the Indian Ocean rim is distinctly patchy. This contrasts with the body of material now available concerning earlier periods, and especially concerning the ear between ca. 500 BCE and 1500 CE. Where research has been undertaken this has tended to have had either a fairly local or at best limited regional focus. This has meant that many of the interconnections between different areas of the Indian Ocean have been left unexplored....
The Strategic Location of the Maldives in Indian Ocean Maritime Trade and Colonization (2017)
The Maldives Islands, situated off the south west coast of India, form a chain trending from north 6.930° to south 0.700° latitude, an extent of approximately 850 km. The chain divides the Indian into east and west as well as marking the divide between the seasonal monsoon weather patterns. Present evidence suggests that the island chain was occupied as early as the 5th or 4th century BC with close ties to India. The islands became strongly culturally and commercially connected to both Asia and...
When did Indian Ocean transform into a trade-lake? Contextualising the archaeological evidence from Pattanam, Kerala, India in the maritime interfaces of the Old World. (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology in the Indian Ocean" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Indian Ocean with its mighty vastness and probably the largest number of diverse cultures settled across its littoral from South Africa to South China played a defining role in the first transcontinental early historic interfaces. The confluence of the three regional trade systems, based on silk, spices and aroma transformed the...