Town and Country: A Regional Study of Swahili Village and Urban Households

University Of Virginia Main Campus, Charlottesville VA

Investigators

Abstract

With National Science Foundation support Dr. Adria LaViolette and her colleagues will conduct three seasons of archaeological excavations on Pemba Island, Tanzania, to address changes in Swahili political economy in the context of Iron Age urbanism. In the first millennium A.D. Swahili society emerged based on farming, fishing, and trade. By the 11th century economic and political centers, called stonetowns, dominated the political and economic landscape of the entire eastern African seaboard. Stonetown merchants presiding over long-distance trade relationships to the African interior and along much of the Indian Ocean rim have formed the basis of reconstructions of Swahili society. With a high density of stonetowns and associated countryside settlements, Pemba Island offers a unique location to study the dynamics of an emerging urban polity. A team of American, Tanzanian, and European archaeologists will investigate households and domestic spaces in one Pemban polity, targeting non-elite households, both urban and rural, hitherto overlooked in reconstructions of Swahili society. Three sites have been chosen for intensive testing and excavations. These include Chwaka, a stonetown inhabited from the 8th -16th centuries, and two villages that date to the 8th-9th centuries and 14th-16th centuries. At these sites, Dr. LaViolette and her collaborators will institute an innovative approach to locating the remains of highly ephemeral earthen houses. Once identified, these household remains will be investigated through large-scale excavations at each site. This will allow a comparison of household assemblages across economic and social classes within a regional polity over an 800-year period. Close examinations of households will allow the reconstruction of the Swahili domestic economy including subsistence, manufacturing, provision of services, and local and regional movement of domestic goods. Targeting the domestic economy provides a counterbalance to the long-distance prestige economy that has dominated the reconstruction of Swahili political economy. The project will thus focus on three questions: What is the pattern of production and consumption in non-elite rural and urban households and how does this compare to that of their elite neighbors? If elites were involved in long-distance trade for the establishment and maintenance of social power, were they able to convert those symbols of power into economic wealth, and how? And, what is the relationship between the domestic and prestige economies in Swahili society? This project contributes to anthropological knowledge about the development of Swahili society; the range of sub-Saharan urban models and socio-economic systems; and cross-cultural approaches to households and regions within complex societies. Within the literature on African complex societies, this study also contributes to a growing understanding of the uniqueness and range of African urbanisms. By exploring the connection between economic wealth and social power-between agrarian economies and prestige economies-this project will draw non-elite people, places, and production into discussions of political economy and social complexity.