The urban history of a rural place: Swahili archaeology on Pemba Island, Tanzania, 700-1500 AD

International Journal of African Historical Studies

Volumn 42, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 433-456

  LaViolette, Adria ^a   Fleisher, Jeffrey ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA   (United States)

^b RICE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77951166537     PISSN: 03617882     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (81)

1. Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989)
2. K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)
3. Graham Connah, African Civilizations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 181-222
4. Michael N. Pearson, Port Cities and Intruders: The Swahili Coast, India, and Portugal in the Early Modern Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998)
5. See Mark Horton and John Middleton, The Swahili (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 66
6. see also G.S.P. Freeman-Grenville, ed., The East African Coast: Select Documents from the First to the Earlier Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 14
7. Sir John Gray, History of Zanzibar from the Middle Ages to 1856 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 18
8. J.S. Trimingham, "The Arab Geographers and the East African Coast" in H.N. Chittick and R. I. Rotberg, eds., East Africa and the Orient (Teaneck, NJ: Africana Publishers, 1975), 115-46
9. Al-Mas'udi, "The Ivory Trade,"
10. reprinted in part in Freeman-Grenville, Select Documents, 17
11. G.S.P. Freeman-Grenville, The Book of the Wonders of India by Captain Buzurg ibn Shahriyar of Ramhormuz (London and The Hague: E.J. Brill, 1981)
12. Horton and Middleton, The Swahili
13. James S. Kirkman, "Excavations at Ras Mkumbuu on the Island of Pemba," Tanganyika Notes and Records 53 (1959), 161-78
14. see also Adria LaViolette, "Swahili Archaeology and History on Pemba, Tanzania: A Critique and Case Study of the Use of Written and Oral Sources in Archaeology," in Andrew M. Reid and Paul J. Lane, eds., African Historical Archaeologies (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2004), 125-62
15. Mark Horton, Zanzibar and Pemba: The Archaeology of an Indian Ocean Archipelago (forthcoming)
16. Gray, History of Zanzibar, 9-30
17. James S. Kirkman, Men and Monuments on the East African Coast (London: Lutterworth Press, 1964), 174
18. Duarte Barbosa, The Book of Duarte Barbosa, ed. by M.L. Dames, Hakluyt Society (1918)
19. reprinted in part in G.S.P. Freeman-Grenville, Select Documents, 133
20. Justus Strandes, The Portuguese Period in East Africa, trans. Jean F. Wallwork, ed. J.S. Kirkman (1899; reprint, Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1961), 114
21. Jonathon Glassman, Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856-1888 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995)
22. Abdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spices, and Ivory in Zanzibar (London: James Currey, 1987)
23. J. Prior, "Voyage in the Nisus Frigate,"
24. "Anonymous: A History of Mombasa c. 1824,"
25. reprinted in Select Documents, 216
26. th Centuries (London: Variorum Reprints, 1988), 133
27. Kirkman, Men and Monuments, 177-78
28. Erik Gilbert, Dhows and the Colonial Economy of Zanzibar 1960-1970 (Oxford: James Currey, 2004), 84
29. F.J. Berg, "The Swahili Community of Mombasa, 1500-1900," Journal of African History 9, 1 (1968), 35-56
30. C.S. Nichols, The Swahili Coast: Politics, Diplomacy and Trade on the East African Littoral, 1798-1856 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1971)
31. Frederick Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labour and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890-1925 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980)
32. Justin Willis, Mombasa, the Swahili, and the Making of the Mijikenda (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993)
33. Glassman, Feasts and Riot
34. Horton, Zanzibar and Pemba
35. Adria LaViolette, "Swahili Cosmopolitanism in Africa and the Indian Ocean World, A.D. 600-1500," Archaeologies 4, 1 (2008), 24-49
36. John Middleton, The World of the Swahili (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 106
37. Peter Garlake, The Early Islamic Architecture of the East African Coast (Nairobi: British Institute in Eastern Africa, 1966), 7
38. Jeffrey B. Fleisher, "Viewing Stonetowns from the Countryside: An Archaeological Approach to Swahili Regional Systems, A.D. 800-1500" (Ph.D. thesis, University of Virginia, 2003)
39. Horton and Clark, "Survey"
40. Fleisher, "Viewing Stonetowns"
41. LaViolette, "Swahili Archaeology and History."
42. M.C. Horton, H.M. Brown, and W.A. Oddy, "The Mtambwe Hoard," Azania 21 (1986), 115-23
43. Kirkman, Men and Monuments, 169
44. Adria LaViolette, "Report on Excavations at the Swahili Site of Pujini, Pemba Island, Tanzania," Nyame Akuma 46 (1996), 72-83
45. Adria LaViolette, "Preliminary Report: Excavations and Survey at Pujini, a Fortress on Pemba Island, Tanzania," Nyame Akuma 32 (1989), 35-38
46. Jeffrey B. Fleisher and Adria LaViolette, "The Changing Power of Swahili Houses, Fourteenth to Nineteenth Centuries A.D.," in R.A. Beck, Jr., ed., The Durable House: House Society Models in Archaeology (Carbondale, IL: Center for Archaeological Investigations, 2007), 175-97
47. Exceptions include our work at an eighteenth-nineteenth-century Mazrui fortification visible on the surface of Tumbe (Adria LaViolette, Jeffrey Fleisher, and Bertram B.B. Mapunda, "Pemba Archaeological Project Preliminary Report: Third Season, June-July 2006," Department of Archives, Museums and Antiquities, Zanzibar)
48. and the recent work of Sarah Croucher, "Plantations on Zanzibar: An Archaeological Approach to Complex Identities" (Ph.D. thesis, University of Manchester, 2008)
49. Abdurahman Juma, Unguja Ukuu on Zanzibar: An Archaeological Study of Early Urbanism (Uppsala: Studies in Global Archaeology, 2004)
50. H. Neville Chittick, Manda: Excavations at an Island Port on the Kenya Coast (Nairobi: British Institute in Eastern Africa, 1984)
51. Juma, Unguja Ukuu, 151
52. th Centuries AD," Journal of African Archaeology 6, 2 (2008), 161-81
53. Adria LaViolette, "Swahili Archaeology on Pemba Island, Tanzania: Pujini, Bandari ya Faraji, and Chwaka, 1997-'98," Nyame Akuma 53 (1999), 50-63. The archaeological testing that accompanied the survey of monuments in Zanzibar and Pemba did not reveal levels earlier than the eleventh century
54. Horton and Clark, "Survey," 1985
55. Jeffrey B. Fleisher and Adria LaViolette, "Elusive Wattle-and-Daub: Finding the Hidden Majority in the Archaeology of the Swahili," Azania 34 (1999), 87-108
56. th-Century Houses from Pemba Island, Tanzania" (paper presented at the Society of Africanist Archaeologists Biannual Meeting, Frankfurt, 2008)
57. Flexner et al., "Bead Grinders, 161-81
58. Tana tradition, or Triangular Incised Ware (TIW) pottery, is a widely recognized ceramic type found along the East African coast from ca. 500-1000 AD. It is associated with the spread of Swahili culture along the coast; see Horton, Shanga
59. and Felix Chami, The Tanzanian Coast in the First Millennium A.D. (Uppsala: Studies in African Archaeology, 1994). It is also found at a small number of known sites at more interior locations. The latter suggests that beyond being a Swahili marker per se, it may indicate participation in an economic network that was concentrated on the coast but included these other settlements. After about 1000 AD, coastal dwellers developed more regionally specific pottery types and Tana/TIW disappeared, although some decorative motifs lived on in later pottery
60. Sarah Walshaw, "Swahili Urbanization, Trade, and Food Production: Botanical Perspectives from Pemba Island, Tanzania, A.D. 600-1500" (Ph.D. thesis, Washington University in St. Louis, 2005)
61. and Manda, from seven to fourteen hectares in the earliest period (Chittick, Manda, 9)
62. Chami, The Tanzanian Coast
63. Paul Sinclair, "Chibuene: An Early Trading Site in Southern Mozambique," Paideuma 28 (1982), 149-64
64. Mark Horton, Shanga
65. As a comparison, at Shanga, Horton found 709 pieces of imported pottery in similarly dated phases in Trench 6-10, a trench more than six times larger than the excavations at Tumbe, 476 sq. m. vs. 72 sq. m. (Shanga, 273)
66. Adria LaViolette and Jeffrey Fleisher, "The Archaeology of Sub-Saharan African Urbanism: Cities and Their Countrysides," in Ann B. Stahl, ed., African Archaeology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2005), 327-52, for a discussion of indigenous urbanism on the East African coast
67. Heisher, "Viewing Stonetowns," 143
68. LaViolette and Fleisher, "Urbanism."
69. Adria LaViolette, Jeffrey Fleisher, and Bertram Mapunda, "Preliminary Report: Pemba Archaeological Project, First Season, June-August 2002," Department of Archives, Museums, and Antiquities, Zanzibar
70. Thomas H. Wilson, "Spatial Analysis and Settlement Patterns on the East African Coast," Paideuma 28 (1982), 201-19
71. Chapurukha M. Kusimba, The Rise and Fall of Swahili States (Walnut Creek: AltaMira, 1999)
72. Richard G. Fox, Urban Anthropology: Cities in Their Cultural Settlings (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1977), 101
73. James de Vere Allen, Swahili Origins (Oxford, UK: James Currey, and Athens: Ohio University Press, 1993)
74. LaViolette, Fleisher, and Mapunda, "Preliminary Report: 2006."
75. Walshaw, "Botanical Perspectives."
76. F.B. Pearce, Zanzibar: The Island Metropolis of Eastern Africa (1920; reprint London: Frank Cass, 1967), 396
77. L.A.C. Buchanan, The Ancient Monuments of Pemba (Zanzibar: Government Printer, Zanzibar Museum, 1932)
78. H.N. Chittick, Kilwa: An Islamic Trading City on the East African Coast (Nairobi: British Institute in Eastern Africa, 1974), 61-95, 161-172
79. Garlake, Architecture
80. H.T. Wright, "Trade and Politics on the Eastern Littoral of Africa, AD 800-1300, in Thurston Shaw, Paul Sinclair, Bassey Andah, and Alex Okpoko, eds., The Archaeology of Africa: Food, Metals and Towns (London: Routledge, 1993), 658-72
81. Wright, "Trade and Politics," 671-72