Modeling Socioecological Transformation in Coastal East Africa: A Case Study from Unguja Island, Zanzibar, Tanzania

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Islands around Africa: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeologists in the Pacific have viewed islands as “laboratories” for studying social, agricultural, and ecological transformations. Can a similar approach be applied to the near-shore island environments of coastal East Africa, and what might island case studies contribute to broader anthropological understandings of East African social complexity and human-environment interactions? This paper considers these dynamics on Unguja Island in Zanzibar, Tanzania, sixth to nineteenth centuries CE. Combining two seasons of systematic survey data with a synthesis of previous research, I outline four phases of transformation: (1) the initial colonization of the island’s coast by fishing, farming, and iron-working proto-Swahili people (sixth–tenth centuries CE), (2) settlement diversification across variable environments alongside the emergence of a class of social elites (eleventh–fifteenth centuries CE), (3) an orientation toward territoriality, monumentality, and seclusion during the early colonial period (sixteenth–eighteenth centuries CE), and (4) large-scale agricultural intensification during the late colonial era (nineteenth–twentieth centuries CE) as the island’s landscapes were transformed for cash crop production. This study demonstrates how the autonomous and integrative activities of rural commoners shaped socioecological systems at different junctures. Furthermore, modeling the island’s settlement trajectory informs an understanding of broader trends in the Indian Ocean and on the African continent.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Islands around Africa: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39366.0