Islands around Africa: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions

DOCUMENT Citation Only Akshay Sarathi.

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. Studies of urbanism in East Africa have tended to focus on the medieval “stone towns” that dot the coast. However, studying these more traditional expressions of urbanism produces an incomplete picture of the settlement patterns of precolonial East Africa. In islands such as Zanzibar, settlement patterns are unique due to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bastiaan Van Dalen.

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. To help protect the Earth’s diverse species from disappearing at an alarming rate, research is needed in important biodiversity hotspots to understand how humans have interacted with their environment throughout history and how these insights can contribute to their future sustainability. Archaeology and paleoecology are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julia Haines.

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. This paper examines changes in settlement patterns in Mauritius over the seventeenth through twentieth centuries and the ways these landscapes are remembered on the island today. I emphasize agro-industrial landscapes as a specific cultural mode of land use and as a spatial phenomenon that has come to define so much of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Krish Seetah.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie Wynne-Jones.

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 role of islands in the western Indian Ocean has been well explored by archaeologists and historians, who point to a combination of natural and social advantages created by these bounded worlds. What has been less commented upon is the role of archipelagoes as crucial units of exploration. In this paper, I review the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Martin Sikora. Krish Seetah. Rosa Fregel.

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. Malaria remains one of the most devastating infectious diseases affecting human populations, with over 200 million cases and 500,000 deaths annually worldwide, most of which focused on the mainlands of sub-Saharan Africa. While malaria is an “old” disease on the mainland dating back tens of thousands of years, its history on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wolfgang Alders.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sasa Caval.

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 Bois Marchand cemetery in Mauritius was established in 1867, during the malaria epidemic, as the largest in the Indian Ocean and the third largest in the world. The Bois Marchand Cemetery Archive (1867–to date) holds a near-complete set of burial records of individuals interred in this cemetery. The records contain...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alessandra Cianciosi.

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. While often forgotten, there are small African islands that played a crucial role in modern history and have often forgotten stories to tell about the impact of colonialism and the diaspora of enslaved and indentured workers. Their role emerged with the emergence of epidemic diseases and the need to manage the health risks...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rosa Fregel. Sara Armas-Quintana. Clara Díaz-Pérez. Javier Serrano. Alejandra Ordóñez.

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. One key period of history involved the forced migration of millions of people due to slavery. Information on the origins of the enslaved individuals has been reconstructed from historical records and, more recently, through the use of paleogenomic techniques. However, all these ancient DNA studies have been performed on...