Southern Africa and the Swahili World

The Archaeologists Felix Chami and Gilbert Pwiti bring us nine studies related to the archaeology of eastern and southern Africa, focusing on on Kenya, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. Chami opens by summarizing historiographic issues related to the Swahili coast. He foregrounds the University of Dar es Salaam Archaeology Unit's recent work at the Swahili town site of Kaole, actually three separate sites located between Bagamoyo and Dar es Salaam which together span A.D. 600 to 1800. He reiterates his case for the central Tanzanian portion of the larger Swahili coast (from Mogadishu in the north to central Mozambique in the south, including the Comoros and northern Madagascar) as the natal zone from which Swahili culture emerged in the mid-first millennium A.D. Citing linguistic data and his own research on ceramics in particular, he argues against the claim that the northern Kenya coast is the primary ancestral zone for Swahili dispersal. This ongoing debate may obscure another possibility: that both zones, as well as others along the coast, may have seen local hinterland populations move into the littoral and create distinctive regions within the larger Swahili world. Such movements would not necessarily be entirely mappable through either ceramic or linguistic data.

In another chapter Chami provides a site report for excavations at Kaole, with its enormous number of standing tombs. Amandus Kwekason, from the National Museum in Dar es Salaam, contributes a chapter on the geo-environmental context of the Dar es Salaam–Bagamoyo stretch of the Tanzanian coast, where Kaole is located. He focuses on faulting and sea-level change, and argues that Kaole's decline as the region's port and the emergence of nineteenth-century Bagamoyo in its stead may have had less to do with politics than with sand-dune formation. Marilee Woods from the University of Witwatersrand provides a study of Kaole's beads. She focuses on some twelve hundred made of glass, the majority of which were Indian in origin, as is the case in most eastern African coastal sites. The beads help provide chronological support for Chami's trench excavations at the site.

Moving away from Kaole, Stéphane Pradines writes of urban organization at the Kenyan site of Gede, a major Swahili stone town of the eleventh to fourteenth centuries. Pradines contends that the divisions seen at Gede between stone and earth-and-thatch sectors, placed into three broad periods, are more the result of indigenous processes than the work of different groups of people (including immigrants), a position that would receive broad support in the context of on-going work at other coastal locales. Bertram Mapunda, from the University of Dar es Salaam, provides a tight historical overview of coastal ironworking based on years of research on the iron technology of the area. He observes that the large-scale ironworking characteristic of Early Iron Working peoples does not seem to follow into larger coastal sites, where there is growing evidence for small-scale, even household-based, crucibular production of iron. Also, he points out the strong possibility that coastal iron was, in some places, being made for export to the Indian Ocean rim.

The final three papers focus on Zimbabwe. Innocent Pikirayi, from the University of Zimbabwe, provides an essay that links pottery and social organization on the Zimbabwe plateau around A.D. 1000. He calls for more attention to models that underscore indigenous transformation of economic systems, rather than those based heavily on population migrations. He also argues that ceramic evidence is most informative when it remains contextualized among other classes of material culture. Gilbert Pwiti, also from the University of Zimbabwe, describes a survey in the Zambezi Valley that resulted in twenty archaeological sites spanning the last two millennia, including two burial sites—the first to contain shaft burials—of the Musengezi tradition. Finally, Shadreck Chirikure, Pikirayi, and Pwiti write about Khami pottery, synthesizing ceramic data from a number of sites to reveal the broad cultural relationships of the late Zimbabwe period and illustrating northern and southern facies of the Zimbabwe tradition.

This is the second volume in a series entitled Studies in the African Past, sponsored by Sida/SAREC, Sweden. Publications such as this are hard-won, coming together in academic environments with serious fiscal constraints. The editors and authors are to be commended for their ongoing research and publication efforts, and for their contributions to the great collaborative project of reconstructing the African past; they remain committed to the multivocality of that project.