Mortimer Wheeler famously tied together the worlds of ancient Rome and ancient India by finding Roman ceramics stratified into levels at Arikamedu, in south India. Late Roman pottery from far down the East African coast now permits the same kind of matching link from the Mediterranean to a distant shore, this one in the Swahili world.
This paper presents the most extensive archaeometallurgical study of iron-smithing debris excavated in East Africa. It presents an integrated methodology, including morphological, chemical, petrographic, and contextual analysis of iron slag excavated from secondary ironworking contexts. Iron slag from three Swahili sites was analysed—Unguja Ukuu located on the southwestern coast of Zanzibar, and Tumbe and Chwaka situated in the north-east of Pemba Island. The results suggest that Unguja Ukuu smithing is associated with oxidising hearth atmospheres and high amounts of CaO, while slag from Tumbe and Chwaka indicates reducing hearth atmospheres and high silica:alumina ratios, potentially pointing to the use of a flux. Distinct technical traditions can be seen at Unguja Ukuu when compared to Tumbe and Chwaka, suggesting a regional rather than chronological pattern. Temporal continuity is evident throughout the occupation of Unguja Ukuu and between sites of different periods in north-western Pemba. The spatial distribution of iron slag at these sites suggests that smithing was taking place across the extent of Unguja Ukuu, while slag scatters were more localised and disassociated from domestic contexts at Tumbe and Chwaka. The wealth of information on technological and organisational aspects of smithing obtained during this study indicates that an integrated methodology can yield valuable data for a variety of smithing sites, irrespective of excavation strategies.
Spatial analysis is paramount for understanding, monitoring, and conserving ancient settlements and cultural landscapes. Advancing remote sensing and prospection techniques are expanding the methodological frame of archaeological settlement analysis by enabling remote, landscape-scale approaches to mapping and investigation. Whilst particularly effective in arid lands and areas with sparse or open ground cover, such as vegetation and buildings, these approaches remain peripheral in tropical environments because of technical and contextual challenges. In tropical Eastern Africa, for example, scales, resolution and visibility are often compromised by thick vegetation cover, inadequate access to, if not lack of, imagery resources and technologies, and the availability of comparative archaeological data for interpretation. This
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