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Research on the archaeology of the coast of eastern Africa is closely associated with the earliest days of the British Institute in Eastern Africa and in many ways quickly became synonymous with the Institute's journal - Azania. This is not surprising given that Neville Chittick, the first Director of the Institute and initial editor of Azania, was...
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... part, this is due to the period during which coastal archaeology was developing. The stonetowns of the eastern coast of Africa ( Figure 1) first attracted attention during the late colonial period, with researchers such as James Kirkman and later Neville Chittick recognising the potential of these sites: the remains of a rich society with trade links across the Indian Ocean throughout the Islamic period. After early investigations at sites on the Kenya coast (Kirkman 1954(Kirkman , 1964, coastal archaeology was really born at Kilwa Kisiwani on the southern Tanzanian coast. ...
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... Unfortunately, the "single-context stratigraphic excavation" practices of the time meant that information was lost that would be relevant to later approaches and methodologies. 76 In recent decades, advances in archaeological methods have combined with new material findings, expanded global histories, and cross-disciplinary, interregional collaborationsespecially including historians of art and Islamic architecture. Those lead to more nuanced understandings that give weight to the Majority World, 77 especially in terms of transcultural and artistic dynamics of the Swahili coast. ...
... As such, Gede is among the city-states associated with the Swahili civilization that stretches from Somalia to Mozambique, covering a distance of over 2500 km in length (Chami et al., 2002;Ichumbaki & Pollard, 2021;Pawlowicz, 2019). Surprisingly, the civilization did not stretch beyond fteen kilometers inward (Fleisher et al., 2015). The coastal people had contacts and traded with hinterland communities (Chami, 1994). ...
... Though the name Gede is of African descent, the architecture and materials collected from the site show a mixture of African and Arabic culture. Nevertheless, like other coastal regions, Gede was occupied by native African people who interacted with people from other areas, including the Middle East, and who formed the Swahili civilization (Fleisher et al.,2015;Ichimbaki,2017). ...
... The Swahili culture and contact with other regions spun over two millenniums (Chami, 1999b; Ichimbaki, Page 6/20 2017; Kusimba & Walt, 2018). The local communities interacted with other cultures, and the intensi cation of trade at the end of the rst millennium set up the urbanization process in Swahili Coast (Fleisher et al., 2015). Therefore, the Gede site was established by Swahili people who borrowed some cultures, including Islam, from foreign traders (Pawlowicz, 2017). ...
For decades, the archaeological work of the Swahili Civilization has mainly concentrated on exploring city-state economic and political dynamics. This paper explores how gender roles were formed, maintained, negotiated, and re-negotiated through time and space in Gede City. Unlike other Swahili city-states, Gede was located around two miles away from the shores of the Indian Ocean. Nonetheless, the city was characterized by security walls, stone houses, mosques, and tombs typical of Swahili City states such as Kilwa. The study employed several data collection methods: archival research, a survey, a re-examination of collected materials, and excavation of the Gede archaeological site. Since the study aimed to examine gender roles across different social classes, three areas were excavated based on their spatial distribution. Thus, the areas were roughly categorized as belonging to elite, middle-class, and lower-class structures. These structures were located in the inner, second, and outer walls of Gede City, respectively. Key findings show that gender identities differed considerably along classes in Gede archaeological site. For instance, the women of the elites and middle class were active participants in Gede's international trade through the production and consumption of imported goods. This participation corresponded with the commercialization of Gede households, especially in elite' areas where they hosted international traders. On the other hand, in middle-class houses, women concentrated on running light industries to supply goods to the urban community. Thus, they were able to afford exotic goods like their elite counterparts. Lastly, the gender roles of the lower class entailed subsistence-gendered roles with little participation in Gede formal commerce. Interestingly, gender roles in Gede were dynamic in nature and response to cultural diffusion, the spread of Islam, the intensification of trade, the diversification of subsistence patterns, and urbanization. Therefore, these findings demonstrate the centrality of gender in the reconstruction of the social lives of the Swahili Civilization.
... Yet the simultaneous effect was to create a chronology by which urban development on the Swahili coast has been measured ever since. For 50 years, Kilwa has stood as the seminal sequence for understanding the origins and development of towns on the precolonial Swahili coast (Freeman-Grenville, 1962a;Horton & Middleton, 2000;Nurse & Spear, 1985;Wynne-Jones & Fleisher, 2015). ...
... A further challenge to the chronology assigned by Chittick was posed by a generation of research on "urban origins" along the Swahili coast (Sinclair & Wandibba, 1988;Wynne-Jones & Fleisher, 2015). Excavations at Shanga during the 1980s (Horton, 1996), the reinterpretation of Manda and sites on Zanzibar (Horton, 1986), and excavations at Unguja Ukuu (Juma, 2004), Ungwana (Abungu, 1988), and Pate (Wilson & Omar, 1997) were providing evidence that the foundation of many sites was in the first millennium AD, associated with a common ceramic tradition. ...
In this article, we present the results of a recent program of high-resolution radiocarbon dating on the urban sequence at Kilwa Kisiwani in southern Tanzania, including Bayesian modeling of 21 calibrated ¹⁴C dates. These data come from the 2016 excavation of a large trench directly adjacent to trench ZLL, one of the key 1960s excavations that served to establish the original chronology of the town. The new sequence reported here anchors the phases of Kilwa’s development for the first time in absolute terms. The dates, stratigraphy, and artifact assemblage offer a number of new insights into the timing and tempo of the occupation at Kilwa, notably placing the first coral buildings and coins at the end of the tenth century. Insights also include findings related to the earliest phases of settlement and periods of possible urban decline. We argue against a trend for understanding Swahili towns according to a common coastal trajectory and suggest that it is important to consider regional diversity by recognizing the particular, episodic sequence at Kilwa.
... In the opening decades of the 20th century, the region's impressive stone towns began to be examined by Western explorers, and systematic archaeological work commenced in the 1950s [64,65]. The origins of these impressive sites, often consisting of many acres of ruined buildings, mosques and palaces, were initially ascribed to external founders from the Gulf and Middle Eastern regions, following the lines of dominant colonial thought at the time [66]. ...
The Rising from the Depths (RftD) network aims to identify the ways in which Marine Cultural Heritage (MCH) can contribute to the sustainable development of coastal communities in Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique and Madagascar. Although the coastal and marine heritage of eastern Africa is a valuable cultural and environmental resource, it remains largely unstudied and undervalued and is subject to significant threat from natural and anthropogenic processes of change. This paper outlines the aims of the RftD network and describes the co-creation of a challenge-led research and sustainability programme for the study of MCH in eastern Africa. Through funding 29 challenge-led research projects across these four Global South countries, the network is demonstrating how MCH can directly benefit East African communities and local economies through building identity and place-making, stimulating resource-centred alternative sources of income and livelihoods, and enhancing the value and impact of overseas aid in the marine sector. Overall, Rising from the Depths aims to illustrate that an integrated consideration of cultural heritage, rather than being a barrier to development, should be positioned as a central facet of the transformative development process if that development is to be ethical, inclusive and sustainable.
... Although undertaken elsewhere in Africa, in Kenya, for example, besides comprehensive paste studies of archaeological pottery from the Kenyan Rift Valley by Wandibba (1983), clay composition analyses have been given little significance. Similarly, reference data from ethnographic analogy are lacking, because archaeological pottery analysis and interpretation have concentrated on forms and decorations to discuss community identities, functions, chronology, and more recently consumption behaviour (e.g., Abungu 1989;Ashley 2010;Ashley and Grillo 2015;Chami 1994;Croucher 2015;Croucher and Wynne-Jones 2006;Fleisher 2010;Wynne-Jones and Fleisher 2015;Msuya and Haaland 2000;Pawlowicz 2013). ...
This paper uses examples of ethnographic clay sourcing strategies from coastal and central Kenyan communities (Digo, Jomvu, Chonyi, Tigania and Mbeere), and potsherds from the Manda archaeological site in Kenya (seventh-fourteenth centuries AD), to illustrate archaeological clay variability and discuss cultural and social behaviour which may contribute to paste inconsistences in an archaeological assemblage. I demonstrate that while function and environmental constraints influence the potters’ decision in the selection of clay sources/treatment, the choice may also be influenced by other factors such as aesthetics, which are dependent on the values of the customer, and in some cases, societal taboos. I also argue that clay sources are not always indicators of production centres, and that heterogeneity and homogeneity in paste composition could imply production centres and customer homesteads respectively.
This Element describes and synthesizes archaeological knowledge of humankind's first cities for the purpose of strengthening a comparative understanding of urbanism across space and time. Case studies are drawn from ancient Mesopotamia, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. They cover over 9000 years of city building. Cases exemplify the 'deep history' of urbanism in the classic heartlands of civilization, as well as lesser-known urban phenomena in other areas and time periods. The Element discusses the relevance of this knowledge to a number of contemporary urban challenges around food security, service provision, housing, ethnic co-existence, governance, and sustainability. This study seeks to enrich scholarly debates about the urban condition, and inspire new ideas for urban policy, planning, and placemaking in the twenty first century.
This is the first interdisciplinary history of Lake Tanganyika and of eastern Africa's relationship with the wider Indian Ocean World during the nineteenth century. Philip Gooding deploys diverse source materials, including oral, climatological, anthropological, and archaeological sources, to ground interpretations of the better-known, European-authored archive in local epistemologies and understandings of the past. Gooding shows that Lake Tanganyika's shape, location, and distinctive lacustrine environment contributed to phenomena traditionally associated with the history of the wider Indian Ocean World being negotiated, contested, and re-imagined in particularly robust ways. He adds novel contributions to African and Indian Ocean histories of urbanism, the environment, spirituality, kinship, commerce, consumption, material culture, bondage, slavery, Islam, and capitalism. African peoples and environments are positioned as central to the histories of global economies, religions, and cultures.
Pottery from archaeological sites on the Swahili coast of East Africa has enabled scholars to establish the social, political and economic dynamics of their inhabitants and helped them to determine forms of interaction between coastal communities and other societies within and outside Africa. This paper examines Plain Ware pottery (Plain Ware Phase) from the site of Nunge in Bagamoyo (Tanzania) to discover the reasons behind its production. Findings indicate that the elements associated with Plain Ware pottery were markers of the socio-economic (i.e. salt-making) and political contexts that the Swahili experienced during the Plain Ware Phase (tenth to thirteenth centuries AD). It is suggested that the use of pottery to make salt for exchange with people in the East African interior created wealth and socio-economic stratification and may have been one of the key elements that contributed to the development of the Swahili coastal states. Comparative data from other regions suggest that salt-making was an important component in socioeconomic interactions among communities and provided an opportunity for surplus production and the establishment of ties among polities.
The Swahili are arguably the most studied society in ancient Sub-Saharan Africa. The Swahili are of African in origin but balance their character between continental Africa and influences from the Indian Ocean, including Islam. City-states and towns along the eastern coast of Africa attest that the Swahili built coral monuments and commercial networks with broad connectivity. Colonial archaeologists claimed foreign origins and cast the Swahili as transplants, false representations evident by 1990 through the contributions of African and other archaeologists and interdisciplinary scholarship. Other aspects of the Swahili continue to be debated, and gaps and shortcomings present impediments to resolution. In this article, we characterize the Swahili and note early trends in the region’s archaeology relevant to contextualize Swahili archaeology post-1990. The article then discusses aspects of Swahili archaeology from 1990 to 2015 and current practices. We note trends, substantive achievements, and lapses in substance and practice during 30 years. Finally, we make observations and suggestions to advance archaeology the region’s archaeology. Archaeology in the Global South can learn from the case of the Swahili and the affirmations, critiques, and suggestions offered here, which we intend to promote future archaeological practice in East Africa.
