Abstract:
Recent archaeological research has firmly established eastern Africa’s
offshore islands as important localities for understanding the region’s
pre-Swahili maritime adaptations and early Indian Ocean trade connections.
While the importance of the sea and small offshore islands
to the development of urbanized and mercantile Swahili societies has
long been recognized, the formative stages of island colonization—and
in particular the processes by which migrating Iron Age groups essentially
became “maritime”—are still relatively poorly understood. Here
we present the results of recent archaeological fieldwork in the Mafia
Archipelago, which aims to understand these early adaptations and
situate them within a longer-term trajectory of island settlement and
pre-Swahili cultural developments. We focus on the results of zooarchaeological,
archaeobotanical, and material culture studies relating
to early subsistence and trade on this island to explore the changing
significance of marine resources to the local economy. We also discuss
the implications of these maritime adaptations for the development of
local and long-distance Indian Ocean trade networks.
