Event: WEDS TALK: Integration and Autonomy in the Island Hinterland of Zanzibar Stone Town, 8th-19th Centuries CE

ABSTRACT: This presentation explores sociopolitical transformations on the East African Swahili coast through a consideration of urban and rural interactions on Unguja Island, in Zanzibar, Tanzania. From humble beginnings as a fishing village in the 10th century, the UNESCO world heritage site of Zanzibar Stone Town on Unguja grew into one of the wealthiest urban centers in the western Indian Ocean by the colonial era. Systematic field surveys guided by environmental models within the interstices of modern development around the town have enabled an investigation of social differentiation in the island’s hinterland. Surveys in 2023 recorded 55 new archaeological sites that help clarify the socioecological dynamics of early settlement on Unguja’s coasts by iron-working agriculturalists, the expansion of precolonial village communities inland, and transformations in the rural countryside associated with early colonial incursions. Ceramic distributions and settlement patterns attest to the integrative tendencies of rural Swahili communities with respect to emergent accumulations of social wealth. Integrative bottom-up activities of rural people may have shaped the trajectories of social complexity in coastal East African societies, specifically the long persistence of heterarchical political systems