Landscapes of Stone in Mauritius and Zanzibar

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Spatial Archaeometry: A Survey of Recent High-Resolution Survey and Measurement Applications" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Using archaeological and geospatial methods, we compare landscape modifications associated with the maintenance of the monocropping plantation orders under Omani, French, and British colonialism in nineteenth-century Zanzibar and Mauritius. How do similarities and differences in the material signatures of these island sites inform an understanding of colonial historical processes in the Indian Ocean? In Zanzibar, Swahili communities displaced from plantation areas built field walls, grew root crops, and dug wells in the coralline limestone bedrock, strategies that enabled community resilience beyond the areas that Omani planters transformed for commodified clove production. In Mauritius, enslaved and indentured people from East Africa and South Asia transformed the previously uninhabited island into a sugar colony; they displaced stones into rocky lines, pyramids, and walls and dug bore holes in the basalt bedrock. This process visibly delineated owned-land from non-property land, altering the very fabric of the island in the process. In both cases, stony landscapes mediated different approaches to agricultural production, land use, and community building. By tracing the material signatures of stony landscape modification we establish a methodology for comparative studies of small-scale adaptations to social and environmental change within the context of large-scale processes of agro-capitalism, colonialism, and ecological transformation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Adventures in Spatial Archaeometry: A Survey of Recent High-Resolution Survey and Measurement Applications   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36987.0