Swahili Urban Foodways and Feasts: From Village to Town

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Cultivating Cities: Perspectives from the New and Old Worlds on Wild Foods, Agriculture, and Urban Subsistence Economies" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Agropastoralists settled along eastern Africa’s coast in the first millennium, bringing with them domesticated sorghum and millets, cattle and ovi-caprids. The opportunities of the coastal environment led to marine resource exploitation and the adoption of rice and other foods introduced through Indian Ocean trade. Fish, rice, millets, and meats formed the dietary and economic bases that supported the rise of villages by the eighth century, and later large Muslim trading towns famed for connecting the Indian Ocean world to African interior riches. In this paper we compare regional patterning and chronological progression of urban foodways along the Swahili Coast. Agriculture, fishing, and herding supported everyday eating as well as special feast days implicated in the negotiation of power in growing towns. We begin with an early example from Pemba Island, examining late first millennium agricultural origins of the stonetown of Chwaka. We then compare this to a rich assemblage of subsistence and culinary data emerging from Songo Mnara in the Kilwa archipelago, site of fourteenth-century bustling town life just prior to Portuguese disruption. Did Swahili town building change across time and space, and what can this tell us about the nature of settlement-subsistence relationships?

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Cultivating Cities: Perspectives from the New and Old Worlds on Wild Foods, Agriculture, and Urban Subsistence Economies

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33392