Swahili Synoecism: Rural Settlements and Town Formation on the Central East African Coast, A.D. 750–1500

Fleisher, Jeffrey

doi:10.1179/009346910x12707321358919

Cited by 47 publications

(37 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…Fletcher (2012) characterizes this type of urbanism as "agrarian low-density urbanism." Yet, unlike the study of Swahili towns along the East African Indian Ocean coast (Chittick 1974(Chittick , 1984Fleisher 2010;Fleisher and Wynne-Jones 2012), historical archaeology never really took off along the shores of the Central African Atlantic. Its development has not gone beyond some isolated studies, such as the excavation of the ship Mauritius of the Dutch East India Company, which sunk off Port-Gentil on the Gabonese coast on March 19, 1609, on its way back from Asia (L'Hour et al 1989).…”

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confidence: 99%

African-European Contacts in the Kongo Kingdom (Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries): New Archaeological Insights from Ngongo Mbata (Lower Congo, DRC)

Clist

Cranshof

Schryver

et al. 2015

Int J Histor Archaeol

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African-European Contacts in the Kongo Kingdom (Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries): New Archaeological Insights from Ngongo Mbata (Lower Congo, DRC)

Clist

Cranshof

Schryver

et al. 2015

Int J Histor Archaeol

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“…Imported ceramic vessels clearly played an important role in Swahili urban culture, often displayed in wall niches and cemented into the exterior and interior walls of mosques and tombs (Donley-Reid 1990;Garlake 1966). These ceramics may also have been linked to the ritual power of feasting, as urban elites began to develop new structures of power (Fleisher 2010a). This importance of feasting-and the tie between imported ceramics and feasting-may be one thread we can see continuing on in some form into the era of clove plantations.…”

Section: Urbanismmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…They are found along a relatively narrow East African coastal strip, and on several islands in the Indian Ocean; the region in which these are found is usually glossed as the "Swahili coast," (Fig. 2.1) although recent scholarship has pointed out some of the clear differences between such sites within this region (Fleisher 2010a).…”

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Why Clove Plantations: East African Archaeology, History, and Anthropology

Croucher

2014

Capitalism and Cloves

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Clove plantations such as Mgoli-the site on Pemba discussed in detail later in this book-were a typical part of the rural landscape of nineteenth-century Zanzibar. During the eighteenth century, Zanzibar, along with much of the rest of the East African coast, had come under the rule of Oman. It was only from the beginning of the nineteenth-century, however, that Zanzibar became a serious colonial outpost of Oman, with significant numbers of Omani immigrants (mostly men) coming to the islands. Omani colonial interests were largely focused on mercantile profits from the caravan trade, but the beginning of the nineteenth-century saw a shift; mercantile profits became increasingly invested into plantations. On Zanzibar, an accident of geography and history meant that clove plantations came to dominate the islands' agrarian economy. By the close of the nineteenth-century, Zanzibar was one of the world's major suppliers of cloves (Martin 1991).This last fact hints at the scale of transformation in the agrarian sector of Zanzibar during this period. But this was not simply a shift in terms of what was being grown. Clove plantations are interesting as they were also a root cause of social transformations across much of the islands. They were the institutions through which plantation residents came to understand their lives, through which social positions were often structured, and they were the context of the majority of day-to-day practices of Zanzibaris through the nineteenth-century. Slavery was at the heart of these transformations; agricultural and domestic labor was carried out by enslaved men and women from mainland Eastern and East-Central Africa. Enslaved women were also commonly present as concubines in elite households. As I discuss in greater detail in Chap. 4, the scale of slavery was immense; by the close of the nineteenth-century, enslaved or recently manumitted individuals outnumbered indigenous Swahili and other immigrant populations (even if the line between these groups were not always clear-cut). As several historians have discussed, the large immigrant African population, along with continued labor migration from mainland Africa, came to be decisive in the social and political formation of contemporary Zanzibar

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“…The site is less than 2 ha in size and contains a compact layer of cultural materials, exclusively comprised of ETT materials. The site was located through archaeological survey in 1999 (Fleisher 2003(Fleisher , 2010a, at which time the site boundaries were located and two test trenches excavated. Research at the site began again in 2002, with an additional 13 trenches excavated in that year and two more in 2006; these excavations covered 143 m 2 .…”

Section: Kimimbamentioning

confidence: 99%

Ceramics and the Early Swahili: Deconstructing the Early Tana Tradition

2011

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Archaeological understandings of the Iron Age societies that developed on the East African coast and its hinterland have been transformed by exploration of locally produced ceramics. During the late first millennium, c. AD 600-900, sites across eastern Africa are characterized by ceramics known as early Tana Tradition or Triangular-Incised Ware, containing necked jars with incised decoration and a series of other jar and bowl forms in varying quantities. The recognition of this pan-regional tradition of pottery, known from an ever-growing number of sites, has been crucial in the reorientation of Swahili research to recognize the indigenous roots of the cosmopolitan coastal culture. This paper reports on the results of a ceramics project that has revisited excavated collections from a series of key ETT/TIW sites, analyzing sherds according to a single system and allowing true cross-site comparison for the first time.The results show regional diversity, in both form and decoration, particularly in the relative importance of the necked jar types that have come to stand for the early Tana Tradition more generally. While previous studies have hinted at regional diversity, such conclusions have been subsumed in discussion by the evident similarities between assemblages. Comparative results are here discussed against the background of previous research at the sites, and a series of conclusions about overlapping spheres of commonality are presented. Rather than critiquing previous work that has recognized this ceramic type, we seek to understand the remarkable distribution better by exploring its context and content.Résumé La compréhension archéologique des sociétés de l'âge du fer qui se sont développées sur la côte de l'Afrique de l'est et dans son arrière-pays a été transformée par l'exploration de céramiques produites localement. Durant le premier millénaire, c.AD 600-900, des sites à travers l'Afrique se caractérisent par des céramiques appelées Early Tana Tradition ou Triangular-Incised Ware, contenant des jarres à goulot avec dessin gravé et une série d'autres formes de pot et de bol en quantités variables. La reconnaissance de cette fabrication traditionnelle de poterie domestique, reconnue par un nombre croissant de sites, a joué un rôle crucial dans la réorientation de la recherche en Swahili afin de reconnaître les racines autochtones de la culture cosmopolite de la côte. Cet article rend compte des résultats d'un projet de céramique qui a revisité des collections excavées d'une série de sites clés ETT/TIW, analysant les tessons selon un système unique et permettant, pour la première fois, une vraie comparaison entre les sites. Les résultats montrent la diversité régionale, dans la forme et la décoration, particulièrement dans l'importance relative des types de jarre à goulot qui en viennent à s'identifier aux "early Tana Tradition" plus généralement. Alors que des études antérieures ont suggéré une diversité régionale, de telles conclusions ont été subsumées dans la discussion par les similitudes évidentes en...

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Swahili Synoecism: Rural Settlements and Town Formation on the Central East African Coast, A.D. 750–1500

Cited by 47 publications

References 34 publications

African-European Contacts in the Kongo Kingdom (Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries): New Archaeological Insights from Ngongo Mbata (Lower Congo, DRC)

African-European Contacts in the Kongo Kingdom (Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries): New Archaeological Insights from Ngongo Mbata (Lower Congo, DRC)

Why Clove Plantations: East African Archaeology, History, and Anthropology

Ceramics and the Early Swahili: Deconstructing the Early Tana Tradition

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