Long-Term Settlement in Plantation Regions of Unguja, Zanzibar

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In this paper, I discuss the results of an archaeological survey conducted in 2019 in north-central Unguja, Zanzibar. The aim of the survey was to investigate the long-term settlement history of regions that were transformed in the nineteenth century by Omani landowners who developed an agricultural export economy using a labor force of enslaved East Africans. The project investigated how the clove plantation economy in Zanzibar developed in relation to deep histories of Swahili land use and settlement on the island, away from the late first millennium and early to mid-second millennium Swahili sites that lie directly on the coast. Using both judgmental and random stratified shovel test pit surveys across different environments, the project characterized the general settlement history of the region from the earliest period of occupation to the development of clove plantations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Results from the survey suggest a phase of occupation in the interior around perennial streams and good soil from the eleventh to fifteenth centuries, followed by a dramatic expansion of small field house and hamlet sites in the late second millennium.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• SAA 2021: General Sessions

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 31991