When Did the Swahili Become Maritime?: A Reply to Fleisher et al. (2015), and to the Resurgence of Maritime Myopia in the Archaeology of the East African Coast

Kusimba, Chapurukha M.; Walz, Jonathan R.

doi:10.1111/aman.13059

Cited by 22 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 67 publications

(66 reference statements)

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“…However, in the last two decades, attempts have been made to shift debates to explore the lives of ordinary people. Various researchers have explored the commoners who lived in the Swahili cities in the last few decades (e.g., Chami, 1994;Kusimba & Walz, 2018;Pradines,2019). These studies were informed by realities of cosmopolitan life that entail different social groups living together where the centrality of exchange and trade is essential.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Built Environments and Implication on Gender Identities in Gede Archaeological Site

Muthegethi

2022

Preprint

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For decades, the archaeological work of the Swahili Civilization has mainly concentrated on exploring city-state economic and political dynamics. This paper explores how gender roles were formed, maintained, negotiated, and re-negotiated through time and space in Gede City. Unlike other Swahili city-states, Gede was located around two miles away from the shores of the Indian Ocean. Nonetheless, the city was characterized by security walls, stone houses, mosques, and tombs typical of Swahili City states such as Kilwa. The study employed several data collection methods: archival research, a survey, a re-examination of collected materials, and excavation of the Gede archaeological site. Since the study aimed to examine gender roles across different social classes, three areas were excavated based on their spatial distribution. Thus, the areas were roughly categorized as belonging to elite, middle-class, and lower-class structures. These structures were located in the inner, second, and outer walls of Gede City, respectively. Key findings show that gender identities differed considerably along classes in Gede archaeological site. For instance, the women of the elites and middle class were active participants in Gede's international trade through the production and consumption of imported goods. This participation corresponded with the commercialization of Gede households, especially in elite' areas where they hosted international traders. On the other hand, in middle-class houses, women concentrated on running light industries to supply goods to the urban community. Thus, they were able to afford exotic goods like their elite counterparts. Lastly, the gender roles of the lower class entailed subsistence-gendered roles with little participation in Gede formal commerce. Interestingly, gender roles in Gede were dynamic in nature and response to cultural diffusion, the spread of Islam, the intensification of trade, the diversification of subsistence patterns, and urbanization. Therefore, these findings demonstrate the centrality of gender in the reconstruction of the social lives of the Swahili Civilization.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Built Environments and Implication on Gender Identities in Gede Archaeological Site

Muthegethi

2022

Preprint

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“…The maritime character of Swahili peoples has long been a topic of archaeological discourse, with debates ongoing about their origins, emergence as culturally 'maritime', and their trans-oceanic connections-implicit, for example, through trade goods and architecture [6,[42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49]. However, it is only recently that Tanzania's maritime and underwater cultural heritage per se has become a direct object of enquiry among academics and heritage professionals.…”

Section: Retrospective: Formal Engagements With Tanzania's Maritime H...mentioning

confidence: 99%

When the ‘Asset’ Is Livelihood: Making Heritage with the Maritime Practitioners of Bagamoyo, Tanzania

et al. 2022

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This paper examines the dilemmas, obligations and opportunities faced by heritage professionals in elaborating cultural ‘assets’ among the breadwinning practices of contemporary, artisanal communities. It takes as its case study the authors’ Bahari Yetu, Urithi Wetu (‘Our Ocean, Our Heritage’) project and its engagement with maritime practitioners in and around the town of Bagamoyo, Tanzania. The article identifies Bagamoyo’s contemporary maritime scene as meriting heritage recognition on a global level, yet sitting entirely outside the country’s legal and political conception of heritage. Moreover, it acknowledges that ‘heritage’ as founded on the livelihood-earning activities of the community’s practitioners, such as boatbuilders, fishers and mariners. These often operate at subsistence level, yet are subject to transformative economic, social and environmental forces, as well as government agencies with no heritage remit. Drawing upon and reporting their co-creative engagements and activities with the Bagamoyo community, the authors argue for a non-reifying and people-centred approach to ‘living’ heritage situations such as that of maritime Bagamoyo, in which the tools of heritage engagement are deployed to amplify the concerns of the practitioner community to a wider audience.

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“…While these burials post-date coastal sites in our study, the Makwasinyi community traded with people in the coastal towns in past centuries and has remained relatively isolated. We thus hypothesized that the genetic ancestry of the Makwasinyi people might be a good proxy for inland African groups that may have been in contact with people from medieval cities on the northern Swahili coast in previous centuries [39, 40].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Entwined African and Asian Genetic Roots of the Medieval Peoples of the Swahili Coast

Brielle

Fleisher

Wynne‐Jones

et al. 2022

Preprint

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The peoples of the Swahili coast of eastern Africa established a literate urban culture by the second millennium CE. They traded across eastern Africa and the Indian Ocean and were among the first sub-Saharan practitioners of Islam. An open question has been the extent to which these early interactions between Africans and non-Africans were accompanied by genetic admixture. We report genome-wide ancient DNA from 80 individuals in five medieval and early modern (1300-1800 CE) coastal towns, as well as people from an inland town postdating 1650 CE. Over half of the ancestry of most coastal individuals came from African ancestors; these African ancestors were primarily female. A slightly smaller proportion of ancestry was from Asia. This Asian component was approximately eighty to ninety percent from Near Eastern males and ten to twenty percent from Indian females. Peoples of African and Asian origins began to mix by around 1000 CE, a time when archaeological evidence documents changes on the coast that are often interpreted as marking the large-scale adoption of Islam. Before roughly 1500 CE, the Near Eastern ancestry detected in the individuals was mainly Persian-related, consistent with the narrative of the Kilwa Chronicle, the oldest history told by the Swahili themselves. After this time, the sources of Near Eastern ancestry became increasingly Arabian, consistent with the archaeological and historical evidence of growing interactions between the Swahili coast and parts of southern Arabia. Subsequent interactions of Swahili coast peoples with other Asian and African groups further changed the ancestry of present-day peoples relative to the ancient individuals we sequenced, highlighting how Swahili genetic legacies can be more clearly understood with ancient DNA.

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When Did the Swahili Become Maritime?: A Reply to Fleisher et al. (2015), and to the Resurgence of Maritime Myopia in the Archaeology of the East African Coast

Cited by 22 publications

References 67 publications

Built Environments and Implication on Gender Identities in Gede Archaeological Site

Built Environments and Implication on Gender Identities in Gede Archaeological Site

When the ‘Asset’ Is Livelihood: Making Heritage with the Maritime Practitioners of Bagamoyo, Tanzania

The Entwined African and Asian Genetic Roots of the Medieval Peoples of the Swahili Coast

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