Swahili Agriculture and Power Dynamics in Regional Perspective

Summary

Urbanization along the Swahili coast coincided with an increasing importance of Islam, stone architecture, and materials traded through connections built inland as well as with Indian Ocean merchants. Archaeobotanical data from the town of Chwaka on Pemba Island, Tanzania (AD 1100-1500) suggest that foodways turned towards Asian crops, including rice and legumes, during the urbanization process. Beyond subsistence, crops held political power. Jeffrey Fleisher (2010) has suggested that feasting was integral to the process of negotiating and maintaining political power among stone-town patricians, and historic records report that rice and other crops grown on Pemba were mobilized for political relations in Malindi. New data emerging from further south on the Tanzanian coast at Songo Mnara (Kilwa archipelago) demonstrates a different pattern of foodways, relying less on Asian rice and more on African grains sorghum and pearl millet. Further south still, archaeological and archaeobotanical evidence from the Mikindani region demonstrate a continued reliance on African crops and inland connections. Here we employ data from three regions using multiple archaeobotanical methods to consider implications for regionalism in subsistence, agriculture, and land use along the Swahili coast in light of the key role food played in supporting, or contesting, political power.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeologies of Empire and Environment   •
• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 14898