Recompiling the Archaeology of East Africa: The Swahili GIS Project, and What Comes Next

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Capacity Building or Community Making? Training and Transitions in Digital Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The East African coast is famous for the stonetowns of the 'maritime trading' culture of the Swahili, but the scale of this region, fractured history of research, and scattered publication of work have until recently prevented macro-scale investigations of settlement patterns and coastal interactions. Furthermore, disparities between the availability of specialist software and training, and access to archives, pay-walled journals and digital resources has hampered both research and international collaborations. The Swahili GIS Project is a recent collaboration between the University of York (UK) and University Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) to digitise the published record of the Swahili Coast in a new GIS database and digital hub at UDSM, with the hope that this becomes a centre for digital archaeological research and education in East Africa. To this end each phase between initial digitisation and final installation has involved training workshops for the benefit of staff, researchers, and students beyond the limits of the project. In this paper we discuss the aims and achievements of the project, lessons learned in the process, and plans for the future of the hub to support its continued expansion as a digital, archaeological, and educational resource for East Africa.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Capacity Building or Community Making? Training and Transitions in Digital Archaeology

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 26227