Climate Change, Disease, and the Collapse of Swahili Urbanism

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Property Regimes" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Complex city-states arose on the East African Coast that were hubs of international trade networks. However, by the seventeenth century, most of these settlements had been abandoned. What were the causes of the Swahili state collapse? Historians and archaeologists have implicated climate change as one of the causal factors in the collapse of highly organized political and social systems. Climate change’s effects on the resilience of populations, in particular on health, food security, and disease in East African Coastal societies over the last 1,000 years have not been fully explored. To what extent did water scarcity caused by the Little Ice Age instigate a health crisis? How and in what ways did climate fluctuations and droughts represent an existential threat to ancient societies and political formations in Eastern Africa? What were the effects of climate change on established and taken-for-granted practices around subsistence, settlement patterns, intra- and intercommunity interactions, and the health and well-being of individuals and communities? What archaeological and ecological signatures did these societies leave behind as they struggled to deal with prolonged drought, competition, hostility, and warfare over declining resources? This paper will report preliminary results gleaned from our ongoing research at Gede in Kenya.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Archaeology of Property Regimes   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40300.0