Social Transformation in the Shadow of the Stone Town: The Archaeology of Rural Landscapes in Zanzibar, Tanzania

This talk describes the use of multitemporal satellite data to facilitate archaeological research on ancient rural landscapes within areas of modern rapid peri-urban growth. Results inform an understanding of how rural and non-elite societies shaped sociopolitical and environmental change in Zanzibar, Tanzania over the last millennium, as the urban center of Stone Town developed from a small Swahili port into the wealthiest city in eastern Africa, the hub of a plantation economy, and the capital of the 19th-century empire of Oman. Archaeological data suggest that rural Swahili people on the island incrementally produced landscapes that enabled them to pursue both autonomous and integrative strategies with respect to different sources of power over the course of the second millennium CE. An orientation toward integrative strategies in particular may have shaped the emergence of political systems characterized by competitive patron-client interactions and heterarchical power distributions, even following multiple episodes of colonial consolidation. These political characteristics influenced the long-term trajectories of social transformation in eastern Africa and the emergence of the globalized Indian Ocean world.