For two millennia, societies in eastern and southeastern Africa have been ... across the Indian Ocean gave rise to and informed the culture and history of the Swahili. For ..... The Making of the Oromo Diaspora: A Historical Sociology of Forced.
Mosaics: Rethinking African connections in coastal and inland Kenya Chapurukha M. Kusimba and Sibel B. Kusimba Abstract We revisit the idea of mosaics and reflect on their usefulness to understanding the Swahili world. A mosaics perspective theorizes ethnic diversity as a landscape of interacting social units, each maintaining a distinct identity but also engaging in interaction with other social units across their boundaries. From this point of view boundaries are made through their mediation, through the movement and engagement across them. Almost always, archaeologists tend to read rupture and discontinuity in material culture as evidence of migration, isolation, breach, disconnection – in other words as some kind of difference. From our mosaics perspective, we examine rupture, boundaries and difference as evidence of interaction, which we view across local, regional, and trans-oceanic scales based on fieldwork in the Tsavo region of southeast Kenya.
Introduction For two millennia, societies in eastern and southeastern Africa have been engaged in Indian Ocean maritime trade. The shaping of identities accruing from trade and interaction across the Indian Ocean gave rise to and informed the culture and history of the Swahili. For many early archaeologists, the Swahili were theorized to be mere recipients of external change or were even imagined as immigrants themselves. Today the tension between external and internal change factors continues, but the transformative role of trade and technology in the evolution of Swahili society is now widely accepted (Kusimba et al. 1994; LaViolette and Fleisher 2005)
1
Many scholars attribute the rise of Swahili polities, with clearly defined hierarchies and differential wealth, to increased interaction with foreign merchants. Others have espoused the view that local agency was as a primary source of inspiration and change. The struggle to overcome this binary vision has a long history. In our work we have proposed two perspectives to counter the external/internal duality; first, the concept of mosaics; and second, the idea of scales of interaction - local, regional, and trans-continental. In this chapter we revisit these two concepts and provide examples of how we have applied them to understanding the Swahili as a regional phenomenon, as the product of human agencies and interactions at many scales, rather than as a coastal culture or ‘maritime society’ (Kusimba and Kusimba 2005; Kusimba et al. 2013; cf. Fleisher et al. 2015). In this chapter we summarize our findings from five seasons of fieldwork conducted in the Tsavo National Park and the Mount Kasigau area (Map 1), where we unearthed more than 250 new archaeological sites in a region previously presumed to be too inhospitable for human settlement. Our radiocarbon dates establish human presence here in the early Holocene, around 12,000 years ago. By the last millennium a mosaic of interactions developed amongst Tsavo’s peoples, who pursued different but complementary food-procurement and economic strategies in a harsh but not uninhabitable environment. The data recovered here illustrate that the origins of material culture so intrinsic to the archaeological definition of Swahili culture was equally as terrestrial as it was maritime.
Mosaics, Boundaries, and Interactions Some theoretical preface is in order. Mosaics are characterized by overlapping distributions of material culture, representing interactions of groups in many different spheres of
2
life. The resulting distributions are complicated to understand for African archaeology which, historically speaking, has taken its primary goal as the description of normative patterns in the ways of life of discrete peoples (Hodder 1977). In defining ethnic groups, archaeologists have been concerned with two major labels: language affiliation and subsistence economy. Historical linguistics has examined change in every aspect of culture that is mirrored in word histories of African languages, identifying inheritance and borrowing through cognate words and reconstructing the prototypes of modern languages and their dates of origin (Ehret 1998). Archaeologists, in turn, have used dating, geographic location, and pottery style to match archaeological occurrences to proto-language families. Studies in mosaics often seek to unravel identities of the likely ancestors of ethnographic peoples using pottery types and linguistic data (Ambrose 1982; Robertshaw and Collett 1983; Huffman 1982, 1989; Ehret 1998). Another way in which social units have been identified archaeologically is through data on subsistence economies. For many anthropological schools, the principal classification of human societies has been by their mode of subsistence: hunting and gathering, pastoralism, horticulture, or agriculture. This long-held classification system has assumed that the way in which food is procured or produced has a significant effect on other aspects of a culture; for example, hunting and band-level organization are thought to co-occur (Roscoe 2002). Archaeologists' economic focus is based on inventories of fauna, flora, lithics, and ceramics, combined with or compared to linguistic data. The economic approach to labelling archaeological units has been particularly useful in eastern African archaeology, which is well suited to produce data about ecology and economy. In African archaeology, ethnic and especially linguistic boundaries have been read in pottery style distributions and plant and animal remains of prehistoric economies, even though
3
the archaeological cultures or traditions are found over much larger areas than are usually occupied by modern ethnic groups. Nevertheless, the dominant approach to mosaics has been to match archaeological groupings to the major linguistic/ethnic categorizations of twentiethcentury eastern Africa. Some important examples include Ambrose (1982, 1984, 1986) and Ehret (1998). Ethnoarchaeologists have described the ethnic dynamics of pottery and material culture in action (Herbich 1987; Hodder 1977, 1982; Nangendo 1994). Our research essentially follows on the path of these earlier studies but relies on historical data as well. Barth (1969) developed an ecological analogy for understanding ethnic mosaics. For Barth, the ecological diversity of a region set the range of possibilities for how communities would organize themselves in order to make a living. He described four kinds of relationships that groups would have with one another. Symbiosis involved groups developing a mutually beneficial relationship; conflict was a state of contested claims to resources; avoidance prevented both competition and cooperation; and segmentary opposition allowed closely related but competing groups to avoid interaction. Most often, a mosaic of communities might use a combination of these practices in playing out interaction over time. Ethnicity emerges from such interactions and negotiations. In Barth’s view ethnicity was a by-product of the signalling of negotiated distinctions and was reflected in the elaboration of difference in material culture. Similar studies of ethnic boundaries in living or historical cultures have shown that material differences are elaborated precisely when and where interaction is greatest. Boundaries are shaped by interaction – a real paradox and a challenge to the commonsense assumptions that archaeologists make when interpreting material culture. While we can read an ethnic boundary, we would be wrong – in fact, completely inverted – to see that boundary as isolation or rupture. In fact boundaries are shaped, sustained, and signalled by
4
interactions across them. Yet boundaries are routinely read in contrasting material culture of ethnic groups in contact. What instead if we saw such contrasts as interaction and flows? Barth’s perspective on ethnicity has been important for archaeologists attempting to interpret variation in material culture. Ethnic, and especially linguistic, boundaries have been read in pottery style distributions and plant and animal remains of prehistoric economies (Ambrose 1984; Kusimba and Kusimba 2005). These archaeological boundaries are generally much larger than present-day distribution of historically recorded ethnic groups. Debate over the meaning of ethnic differences in the archaeological record continues. Do these boundaries relate to language families, to the early stages of migrations of people with distinct material culture from elsewhere, to differences in economic specialization around hunting and gathering, pastoralism or farming and the mix of these three strategies? In general there still remains confusion over ethnicity itself. How important was it as a form of identity and as a way of structuring interactions? In the Central Rift Valley, a variety of scholars have drawn attention to the very different forms of identity that may have been more important than ethnicity. People may have identified with a much smaller group, including families, kin and local area; people cultivated contacts and alliances with others; clans and families, because of distinct ritual knowledge, could move across and between groups too. Individuals had many axes of identification other than ethnicity. It was, as Ambler (1988:32) calls it, ‘a complex world of overlapping, layered, and shifting associations’. Of course ethnicity can emerge internally without reference to an ‘other’; and culture differentiates internally as groups within it differentiate themselves. Finally cultural distinctiveness can also mean – and often does mean – that two societies did not interact. Sometimes a boundary really is a boundary. So what is an archaeologist to do then? The mosaics approach, then, is well suited to eastern Africa but like all
5
interpretive tools is potentially flawed. A more empirical and flexible approach might be that of scales of interaction.
Scales of Interaction The scales of interaction approach arises from the hypothesis that no single region in the world is completely self-sufficient and must build networks of interaction with other regions to enable it to access resources that are crucial to its daily existence and productivity. Thus we hypothesize that Swahili urbanism was a product of trade networks on local, regional, and international levels, and must be understood from a multi-scalar perspective. This perspective requires us to examine the archaeological record as evidence for nodes of interactions that incorporate all regions as a proxy for understanding and making sense of long-term perspectives on change at local, regional and extra-regional scales. It is only by analysing data from many sites within different ecological zones and regions that we are able to address questions such as: ‘How and in what ways did the specific geographical location of coastal society influence its character?’ ‘How did emergent urban polities respond to local, regional, and trans-continental crises?’ ‘How and in what ways were they vulnerable or immune to external factors?’ And ‘how did they in turn influence and shape these same factors?’
Eastern Africa in the last two millennia: mosaics and interactions Swahili culture is a product of interaction at all such imbricated scales, and its development was affected by all of these scales. We should point out that some have found shortcomings in applying the mosaic approach to the complex history of interactions amongst eastern African peoples. Currently, debate rages over the correct application of terms and identification of
6
groups among the ‘agriculturalist’, ‘hunter-gatherer’, and ‘pastoralist’ societies composing the mosaic. Some deny that identifying ‘hunter-gatherers’ versus food producers is a simple matter of assessment of site contents, such as proportions of wild to domestic cattle (Schrire and Deacon 1989; Morrison 2002; Mapunda 2003; Sadr 2003; but see Terrell et al. 2003). Most ancient economies were significantly less specialized than ethnographically known ones, and likely exchanged foodstuffs. Schrire (1992) for example, has pointed out that many regional site inventories form a continuum when proportions of wild/domestic fauna, pottery, lithic artefacts, and other artefact types are considered. For other scholars, however, ethnic groups and economic specializations can be legitimately deduced from site location, technology, and economy. For example, in southern Africa scholars have argued that hunter-gatherer sites can be clearly separated from those of food producers based on location in a rockshelter or the absence of pottery or iron artefacts. For others, the complex history of interaction and exchange makes differences difficult to discern (Schrire 1992). Identifying the tiles of the mosaic is a problem whose solution may rest on new techniques of identification, for example pottery sourcing, as well as the use of historical documents (Sadr 2003).
The Tsavo mosaic Our research in the Tsavo region has sought to understand the history of interactions, economy, and ecology amongst Tsavo's diverse peoples, including their relationships with their coastal neighbours. The historic peoples of the Tsavo include the Waata, understood to be peripatetic foragers; the Taita agriculturalists of the terraced uplands of the Taita Hills; the Akamba agropastoralists; and the Oromo pastoralists who had an origin in present-day Ethiopia and
7
Eritrea. The Taita also speak of the Wambisha pastoralists, whom they assimilated and displaced upon their arrival in the sixteenth century.
A regional approach encompasses understanding the nature of relationships that existed between towns, their rural neighbours, and those of the most economically crucial trading partner—the interior. Since 1997, our research in the Tsavo region, 150 km west of the Kenyan coast, has illustrated the complementary and intertwined networks that characterized the Swahili world. Data derived from archaeological surveys and excavations, ethnohistorical evidence and ethnoarchaeological research reveal that Tsavo inhabitants pursued complementary economic strategies and maintained a high degree of trade and movement across community identities in spite of ethnic boundaries (Prins 1967; Ehret and Nurse 1981). Our surveys identified 250 new archaeological sites in addition to 150 described by the late Frederick Thorbahn (1979). These sites fall into macro patterns, namely residential, mortuary, extractive, economic (agricultural terraces, irrigation canals, meat drying, and trade), and fugitive stockades discussed in detail elsewhere (Kusimba et al. 2005, 2013).
Residential sites Residential sites included open-air hunter-gatherer, rock shelter, cave, and sedentary settlements. As in other regions in Africa, open-air hunter-gatherer settlements were marked by extensive cup-shaped hollows that could be found in almost all-prominent low inselbergs and on rocks along seasonal springs and rivers. These hollows ranged from a handful to several hundred. Many represented food-processing activities such as grinding cereals and roots, and skin tanning; others bore evidence of recreational use and were likely precursors of the African bao game.
8
Still others may have been used as symbolic markers (David 1998). Hobley (1895) wrote that Tsavo's prominent inselbergs were used historically as regional market centres attracting peoples from the wider region. Regional trade and exchange in bush and agricultural products are known to have occurred at inselbergs, such as the prominent Mudanda Rock in Tsavo East and the Rhino Valley Rock in Tsavo West (each almost 1 km long). At Mudanda, large quantities of chert and quartz stone tools were found, although construction of a waterhole had disturbed these finds. The Rhino Valley Rock area contained over 300 cup-shaped hollows of different sizes and shapes, showing the diversity of economic activities carried out at this locality. Future excavations will target these areas for testing the hypothesis concerning their role as centres for interregional trade and exchange, as well as determining clear chronological relationships.
Full coverage survey of Tsavo will doubtless recover hundreds of rockshelters and caves. Tsavo rockshelters and caves were used as seasonal residential areas and ephemeral campsites for hunter-gatherers, but some of the shelters were used for highly specialized activities, including as ancestral shrines or armouries for the community's weaponry. Many were associated with rainmaking and, from the eighteenth century, increasingly served as stockades for defence during times of stress and warfare. Later many became areas for penning and pen-feeding of livestock (Kusimba 2004, 2009).
Agricultural landscapes Our surveys recovered terraced settlements and fields similar to those at Engaruka and in Pokot (Sutton 1998; Bollig 2006; Davies 2012). Mount Kasigau’s entire hillslope contained a complex maze of terraced fields, as did Ngulia Hills. These fields run across ridges sculpted by seasonal
9
springs, streams and small rivers. Each ridge contained extended family houses and the fields where they sowed sorghum, millet, beans, pumpkins, and, later, maize. Local village elders maintain that each lineage occupied several terraces adjacent to each other. Elders we interviewed emphasized that the system of land tenure recognized individual rights to terraced land. Abandoned and/or poorly maintained terraces endangered neighbouring terraces, and thus would have been leased to individuals or families in need of land. In later years, these terraces suffered neglect as people relocated.
Mortuary and ritual sites Mortuary sites including graves, cemeteries, cairns, and skull interment sites occur widely in the Tsavo region (Lugard 1959:261; Soper 1965:4 1976; Thorbahn 1979; Kusimba et al. 2005). Thorbahn (1979: 210–11) attributed burial cairns to Oromo pastoralists, who inhabited Tsavo's arid plains until it was designated a national park in 1948 (cf. Gregory 1896: 325). Local Taita informants have variously attributed cairns to the Wambisha and Oromo (Soper 1965). Lone graves marked by stones along known trade routes are often attributed to Arab, Swahili, and other caravan traders and porters. We assume that slave captives who succumbed along the way—victims of thirst, disease, and a host of other agents of death—were rarely buried. Skull sites in the region are attributed to the Taita.
Our team discovered eight cranial display niche sites with skull remains. Taita interment sites were located close to villages in outlying rock shelters, rock crevices, and shallow coves. The shelters for the ancestors were placed in dry and quiet places that were in close proximity to inhabited areas, so that they could be maintained and protected from predators as well as
10
witches. Ancestors were regularly propitiated in order for them to ward off potential calamities and crises like drought, disease, childlessness, and witchcraft. At one in Saghala, a nearby large rock was used as an altar for preparing gifts to present to ancestors. Large partially broken pots and gourds found at interment sites provided evidence for the ceremonial feasting that occurred at these sites. Sites of production Extractive economies, including stone-tool making, iron smelting and smithing, salt making and mining played a key role in the regional and extra-regional economy. Tsavo had abundant ores and wood charcoal to sustain major ironworking industrial complexes. One such region was Kasigau, where we recovered three large iron-working sites at Rukanga, Bungule, and Kirongwe. These sites were approximately one hectare each, and were centres of intensive iron production at a time that coincided with the growth of trade on the coast. They were located in rockshelters. A stratigraphic sequence of nine radiocarbon dates move from the present back to 1150 70 BP at Kirongwe 1, hereafter K1 (Kusimba et al. 2006). Furnace technology was primarily comprised of bowl furnaces. Our survey and subsequent excavations of smelting sites at Kirongwe recovered five smelting furnaces at a single site. The recovery of a smithy at K1 revealed multiple uses of the rockshelter for residence and craft activities, including smithing. Excavated artefacts at rockshelters K1 and K2, including a stone anvil, a large volume of tuyere fragments, slag, and both finished and unfinished iron tools attest to the complexity of iron production in Tsavo. Significant volumes of slag and slag-wetted tuyeres recovered relate to the most intensive iron smelting occurred from 1150 70 to 840 70 BP. It is significant to note that major changes have occurred during the last 500 years: the reappearance of stone tools use at these sites indicate reoccupation of the site by a group possessing an expedient technology.
11
Elsewhere in Tsavo, at Kisio Rock shelter, a similar quartz stone tool industry is associated with wild fauna and abundant beads of stone and shell (S. Kusimba 2003). In the upper levels of K1, a stone tool-using group left abundant trade beads, which included post-sixteenth century European beads (Dussubieux et al. 2008).
Kasigau’s iron industry probably supplied tools needed for farm work and for killing elephants and rhinoceros when demand for ivory increased in Asia. Taita and Sanye elders point out that Kasigau iron’s primary clientele were the professional hunters who made a living through hunting of elephants and provisioning ivory to coastal merchants, as well as to local farmers. Stockades Fugitive stockade sites including dry-stone rock shelters, cattle and goat pens, are found from the seventeenth century onwards. The majority of these sites are rockshelters and caves that were fortified as responses to declining regional security (Kusimba 2004, 2006). Eighteen out of a total of forty-one rockshelters in Kasigau exhibited some evidence of fortification. The enclosures have large dry-stone wall faces supported by vertical wooden frames. Most sites have two sections: one for people and the other for livestock. They generally have an entrance and exit and, in these cases, both accesses are protected by wooden partitions that run parallel to the wall.
For example, Bungule 20 is a formidable structure measuring 66 m2 with a ceiling height ranging between 0.30 and 1.75 metres. Three radiocarbon samples obtained from the vines and wood holding the dry-stone wall had uncalibrated radiocarbon ages of 207 40, 290 70, 300 70 BP,
12
placing the calibrated date of construction of the wall sometime in the last 400 years at two standard deviations.
Excavations further revealed a detailed process of dry-stone construction. This involved the digging of a foundation and erecting of wooden frame with termite-resistant hardwoods tied with twine. Large rocks would then be piled along the wooden frame from the base foundation, and smaller blocks would be fitted into any open spaces remaining. Finally, clay soil from the termite hills was applied as a plaster seal to ward off insects and the elements. The resulting structure was strong, impenetrable, and aesthetically beautiful. The recent date of rampart construction and paucity of cultural artefacts corroborate informants' oral histories, indicating that Bungule 20 and other similar rockshelters were fortifications and refugia against slave hunters and others feared by Kasigau people.
The chronology of the Tsavo mosaic Based on the radiocarbon dates obtained from Tsavo, we reconstructed the chronological history of Tsavo into five major periods (Kusimba et al. 2013). Period 1: Early-Late Holocene (cal. 10,000–3,000 BCE) This period is derived from Bungule 1, and is characterized by reliance on wild fauna and quartz stone tools; no data are available to support the existence of interactions between Tsavo and the coast at this time. Period 2: Pastoral Neolithic-Early Iron Working (cal. 3,000–500 BCE) Represented by the recovery of molars of Bos taurus at the riverine sites of Kahinju at 3,870 330 years BP (UIC1068) and Kathuva at 3,450 290 years BP (UIC921) (Wright 2005). At 13
B9, domesticated cow are present in levels dating to this period, as are beads, some of marine shell and demonstrating contact with the coast. These data show that domesticated animals appear in Tsavo as early as they do in the Central Rift Valley. We recovered no clear evidence of conduct with the coast. Period 3: Early Iron Working (cal. 500 BCE–1,000 CE) Period 3 is characterized by the introduction of intensive iron production in Tsavo, visible at sites Kirongwe 1-7. The volume of slag is comparable with the scale of smelting industries undertaken at other eastern African sites, including Limbo and Galu (Kusimba 1993; Kusimba et al. 1994; Chami 1994; Schmidt 1997; Kusimba and Killick 2003; Mapunda 2003). Kirongwe iron was traded on a regional scale. Period 4: Late Iron Working (cal. 1000 CE - 1500 CE) This period saw the flourishing of a regional economic system, illustrated by the diversity of site types in Kasigau, Ngulia Hills and Rhino Valley, Konu Moju and Dakota plains. Sites include rockshelters, caves, villages and homesteads, and pastoral villages and camps. The artefacts and features that are noteworthy at this site include dry-stone work around rockshelter livestock pens; terraced farming; trade goods such as ivory and ostrich egg shell, marine, and glass beads; and the continued use of stone tools for specialized tasks by many groups, especially the foragers. Period 5: Colonial (cal. 1500 CE - 1900 CE) This final period covers the abandonment of many settlements in the plains and lower slopes in preference for hilltops, hillsides, and generally hard-to-reach places as favourable areas for settlement. The majority of these sites were fortified. Among the Taita, we witness the emergence of the cult of ancestor veneration (Bravman 1998). We hypothesize that transformation in mortuary behaviours, such as disinterring ancestor skulls, developed in
14
response to decreasing amounts of cultivable land as people became more tethered to the hills. The low volume of artefacts recovered at Period 5 sites points to a decline in interregional trade and craft specialization. On Kasigau, this period is associated with important evidence of disruption of these mosaics – hilltop refuge sites, often heavily fortified with dry-stone architecture. These fortified rockshelters are a potent reminder of the costs of interactions during the historic period, when the slave and ivory trade became a focus of the caravans.
Mosaics: intertwined relationships between the coast and interior Both historians and archaeologists have demonstrated the inclusivity of regional trade networks in African economies (Dalton 1977). The recovery of substantial volumes of glass beads at all sites ranging from rockshelters to sedentary residences points to the resilience of coast-hinterland interactions (Dussubieux et al. 2008). Waata foragers actively participated in long-distance trade as far as the Kenya coast as specialized hunters and apiculturists who provided ivory, skins, honey, beeswax, and other animal products (Muriuki 1974: 100-109). They were also the chief distributors of poison to Akamba and Taita hunters, who revered them for their knowledge of the bush country and tracking skills. Although frequently considered a caste of the Oromo people, they maintain their own identity (Bulcha 2002). Their trading partners included the Arabs, Gujarati Indians, Swahili, Oromo, Giriama, and Akamba traders. In exchange for ivory, rhino horns, and animal skins, they received cereal, milk products, cloth, shell, glass beads and other products. Waata women were known as specialized apiculturists who collected, processed, and peddled honey and beeswax at regional and coastal markets. Beeswax was an important ingredient for hafting arrows and spears and caulking boats and ships and was in high demand all over eastern Africa and beyond.
15
The high demand for ivory created favourable conditions for the emergence of professional hunters. Waata honed their skills of hunting and tracking elephants and other big game and invented poison so potent it could kill an adult elephant within fifteen minutes. Their superior tracking and hunting skills, potent poison, and hunting ethic enabled them to be more selective in their choice of the animals they killed. Informants say that Waata never killed elephants randomly, but rather chose older, mature, and mostly male animals as their quarry.
We address these issues via Tables 37.1-37.5. Table 37.1 shows the crucial products in the domestic economy of the coast and their origins. Table 37.2 lists major exports from eastern Africa to markets in the Indian Ocean. Table 37.3 shows the origins of important valued items in the domestic economy and in the exchange economy with foreign markets. Finally, Tables 37.4 and 37.5 show the sources for trade items exported to five different key markets from eastern Africa. Collectively, they illustrate several important points regarding Swahili connections and networks. First, items of value circulated to both the domestic economy and to the export enterprise of the coastal elites. The origins of the Swahili economy, on both local domestic and export levels, were both local and regional in extent. Indeed most of the products important to both local and regional scales were themselves not coastal in origin. The interconnectedness and dependency on multiple sources for valued items and on multiple markets for such items place Swahili polities as part of a network of relationships at all scales.
16
To explain the social basis of this network, one looks to interpersonal relationships. The richness of the Swahili material assemblage was built on person-to-person relationships. Over time a managerial elite came to dominate and profit from the regional and transoceanic economy. Trade and other opportunities spawned subsidiary craft specialization enterprises. These would include iron smelting and blacksmithing to provision hunters, herders, miners, farmers, and warriors; poison making to provision hunters and warriors; basket making to provision caravan traders and porters; potting and grindstone carving to provision farmers, hunter gatherers, and herders.
Between 1400 and 1600 CE Kasigau in Tsavo served as a major distribution centre for local and regional trade, as well as lodging and camping ground for interior and coastal long-distance trade (Wakefield 1870). Trade items exchanged at Kasigau and other such centres included beads, cloth, textiles, honey and beeswax, fresh fruits, milk, ivory, rhinoceros horn, animal skins among others. The introduction of coastal crops like coconuts, tamarind, oranges, lemons, and mangoes in Kasigau was in part a response to the trade boom and the high demand for such products among coastal traders. Everyone in the Tsavo region and beyond appears to have been involved in regional trade (Smee and Hardy 1811: 176). The area demonstrates the importance of a regional perspective on diverse ethnic and economic mosaics and the trade in local products like iron, honey, buttermilk, and poison. Trade beads and marine shells that are found in far hinterland sites demonstrate regional contact with the coast. The presence of refuge sites (Kusimba 2006) attests to the widespread insecurity and collapse engendered by the colonization of the East African coast and the rise of the slave trade. The cultural mosaic of Tsavo as we describe it here was profoundly shaped by interaction with the Swahili coast; and vice versa.
17
Thus, we want to reiterate that Swahili urbanism, being a product of trade networks on local, regional, and international levels, requires a mosaic perspective to understand it. Through this approach we have gained an appreciation of the contributions of multiple segments of society that are so often left out in archaeological accounts of Swahili urbanism. As we show in Tables 37.1 – 37.5, the evolution of the Swahili world was based on an assemblage of people, artefacts, interactions, and relationships of trust and exchange at scales both interpersonal and institutional. Interacting communities and regions were each endowed with unique spheres of knowledge and resources that nevertheless contributed to the whole. A regional networked approach that draws data from many sites within the different ecological zones and regions can allow systematic comparative analysis of these changes and social patterns. Our regional multi-site research discussed here reveal the productive insights that situate Swahili urbanism within multiple landscapes of interaction.
Conclusion Anthropology and archaeology shared the colonial task of labelling and describing African peoples as a patchwork of bounded ethnic groups or tribes, each with an associated language, ecology and economy, and social organization. African archaeologists could not help but to reinforce the view of cultures as bounded wholes, as they tended to find and recognize normative patterns in the archaeological record that they then linked to present-day ethnic groups. Economy, ecology, and linguistics were particularly powerful indices of differences archaeologists used to identify intersections of similar material culture – which have been interpreted as and connected to contemporary examples of economic and linguistic groups. This
18
is not to say that ethnic groups and boundaries are a figment of analysis: far from it. But too often boundaries are assumed to be static walls. Rather, boundaries are means through which interaction actively shapes difference. These boundaries can happen between language and lifeway, or social classes, or among category, gender, religion, or other recognized or defined fields of difference. At the same time, there must be some aspects of culture and communication that are shared - what McIntosh (1989) called ‘the reservoir of symbols, myths and beliefs’ through which mediation can happen in mutually agreed upon ways. Even the unity of Swahili society, however this was recognized, was an active process whereby differences and differentiation shaped a society that was increasingly complex internally. Acknowledgements
Chapurukha M. Kusimba and Sibel B. Kusimba’s research in Kenya has generously been supported by the National Museums of Kenya and the Republic of Kenya through research permits and excavation permits: 0P/13/001/25C 86; MHE & T 13/001/35C264, and NCST/5/C/002/E/543. The bulk of the research reported here was carried out when Chapurukha was at the Field Museum of Natural History and University of Illinois-Chicago and Sibel was at Northern Illinois University-Dekalb. Generous financial support from the US National Science Foundation SBR 9024683 (1991-3); BCS 9615291 (1996-8); BCS 0106664 (2002-04); BCS 0352681 (2003-04); BCS 0648762 (2007-09; BCS-1030081 (2010-12), the US National Endowment for the Humanities (2012-14), the US IIE J. W. Fulbright Sr. Scholars Program 2002-3; 2012), National Geographic Society (1996-7), Wenner-Gren Foundation (1991), and the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (1991) have enabled Chapurukha and his colleagues to conduct research in Kenya. We thank Dr. George H. Abungu, Dr. Idle
19
Farah, Dr. Purity Kiura, Dr. Mzalendo Kibunjia, Angela Kabiru, Ahmed Sheikh Nabhany, Athman Lali and the Mchula family in Mombasa, Lamu, and Faza for their unwavering support over the years.
List of tables Table 37.1. Origins of products important in the domestic economy Table 37.2. Eastern African exports Table 37.3. Origins of valued items in the domestic and export economies Table 37.4. Foreign markets for trade items from the eastern African coast Table 37.5. Products exported to five different markets - Arabia, Persia, India, China, and Southeast Asia References cited Ambler, C.H. 1988. Kenyan Communities in the Age of Imperialism: Central Region in the Late Nineteenth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ambrose, S.H. 1982. “Archaeological and linguistic reconstructions of history in East Africa”. In The Archaeological and Linguistic Reconstruction of African History, edited by C. Ehret and M. Posnansky, 104-157. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ambrose, S.H. 1984. “Introduction of pastoral adaptations to the highlands of East Africa”. In From Hunters to Farmers, edited by J.D. Clark and S. Brandt, 212-239. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ambrose, S.H. 1986. “Hunter-Gatherer Adaptations to Nonmarginal Environments; An Ecological and Archaeological Assessment to Dorobo Model”, Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika 7:11-42. 20
Barth, F. 1969. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. Bergen: Universitets Forlaget. Bollig, M. 2006. Risk Management in a Hazardous Environment: A Comparative Study of Two Pastoralist Societies. New York: Springer. Bravman, B. 1998. Making Ethnic Ways: Communities and Their Transformation in Taita, Kenya, 1800-1950. Portsmouth: Heinemann. Bulcha, M. 2002. The Making of the Oromo Diaspora: A Historical Sociology of Forced Migration. Minneapolis: Kirk Publishing House. Chami, F. 1994. The Tanzanian Coast in the First Millennium AD: An Archaeology of the Ironworking, Farming Communities (Vol. 7). Uppsala: Societas Archaeological Upsaliensis. Dalton, G. ed., 1977. Tribal and Peasant Economies: Readings in Economic Anthropology (No. 2). Austin: University of Texas Press. David, N. 1998. “The ethnoarchaeology and field archaeology of grinding at Sukur, Adamawa State, Nigeria”, African Archaeological Review 15(1): 13-63. Davies, M.I. 2012. “Some thoughts on a ‘useable’ African archaeology: settlement, population and intensive farming among the Pokot of northwest Kenya”, African Archaeological Review 29(4): 319-353. Dussubieux, L., C. Kusimba, V. Gogte, S. Kusimba, B. Gratuze, and R. Oka 2008. “The trading of ancient glass beads: New analytical data from South Asian and East African sodaalumina glass beads”, Archaeometry 50: 797-821. Ehret, C. 1998. An African Classical Age: Eastern and Southern Africa in World Prehistory, 1000 BC to AD 400. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Ehret, C. and D. Nurse. 1981. “The Taita Cushites”, Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika 3:125168.
21
Fleisher, J., P. Lane, A. LaViolette, M.C. Horton, E. Pollard, E. Quintana Morales, T. Vernet, A. Christie, A. and S. Wynne‐Jones 2015. “When Did the Swahili Become Maritime?”, American Anthropologist 117(1): 100-115.
Gregory, J.W. 1968. The Great Rift Valley, Being the Narrative of a Journey to Mount Kenya and Lake Baringo with Some Account of the Geology, Natural History, Anthropology and Future Prospects of British East Africa. London: Frank Cass and Co. Herbich, I. 1987. “Learning Patterns, potter interaction, and ceramic style among the Luo of Kenya”, African Archaeological Review 5:193-204. Hobley, C.W. 1895. “Upon a visit to Tsavo and the Taita Highlands”, The Geographical Journal 5(6): 545-561. Hodder, I. 1977. “Some New Directions in the Spatial analysis of Archaeological Data at the Regional Scale (Macro)”. In Spatial archaeology, edited by David L. Clarke, 223-351. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hodder, I. 1982. Symbols in Action: Ethnoarchaeological Studies of Material Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huffman, T. 1982. “Archaeology and ethnohistory of the African Iron Age”, Annual Review of Anthropology 11: 133-50. Huffman, T. 1989. “Ceramics, settlements, and late Iron Age migrations”, African Archaeological Review 7: 155-182. Kusimba, C.M. 1993. The Archaeology and Ethnography of Iron Metallurgy of the Kenya Coast. Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Bryn Mawr College.
22
Kusimba, C.M. 2004. “The Archaeology of Slavery in East Africa”, African Archaeological Review 21: 59-88.
Kusimba, C.M. 2006. “Warfare in African Chiefdoms” In Violent Transformations: The Archaeology of Warfare and Long-Term Social Change, edited by E. Arkush and M. Allen, 214-249. Gainesville: University of Florida Press. Kusimba, C.M. 2009. “Landscape at two scales: economy and trade in east Africa”. In Polities and Power: Archaeological Perspectives on the Landscapes of Early States, edited by S.E. Falconer and C.L. Redman, 163-178. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Kusimba, C.M., D.J. Killick, and R.G. Cresswell 1994. “Indigenous and imported metals at Swahili sites on the coast of Kenya”, Society, Culture, and Technology in Africa 11: 6377. Kusimba, C.M. and D. Killick 2003. “Iron production on the Swahili Coast”. In East African Archaeology, edited by C.M. Kusimba and S.B. Kusimba, 99-116. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kusimba, C.M. and S.B. Kusimba. 2005. “Mosaics and Interactions: East Africa, 2000 B.P. to the Present”. In African Archaeology. A critical introduction, edited by A.B. Stahl, 392419. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Kusimba, C.M., S.B. Kusimba, and D.K. Wright 2005. “The Development and Collapse of Precolonial Ethnic Mosaics in Tsavo, Kenya”, Journal of African Archaeology 3(2): 243265.
23
Kusimba, C.M. and R. Oka. 2009. “Trade and Polity in East Africa: Re-examining Elite Strategies for Acquiring Power”. In The Changing Worlds of Atlantic Africa, edited by T. Falola and Matt D. Childs, 39-60. Durham: Carolina Academic Press. Kusimba, C.M., S.B. Kusimba, and L. Dussubieux 2013. “Beyond the Coastalscapes: Preindustrial Social and Political Networks in East Africa”, African Archaeological Review 30: 399-426. Kusimba, S.B. 2003. African foragers: Environment, Technology, Interactions. Walnut Creek: Rowman Altamira. LaViolette, A. and J. Fleisher. 2005. “The Archaeology of sub-Saharan urbanism: Cities and their countrysides”. In African Archaeology. A critical introduction, edited by A. Stahl, 392-419. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Lugard, F.D. 1959. The Diaries of Lord Lugard, Volume 1. East Africa, Nov. 1889-Dec. 1890. London: Faber and Faber. Mapunda, B.B.B. 2003. “Iron technology and deforestation: myths and realities”. In International Conference on Forest and Environmental History of the British Empire and Commonwealth, Centre for World Environmental History, University of Sussex. McIntosh, R.J. 1989. “Middle Niger Terracottas before the Symplegades Gates”, African Arts 22: 73-83, 103-104. Morrison, K.D. 2002. “Pepper in the hills: upland-lowland exchange and the intensification of the spice trade”. In Forager-traders in South and Southeast Asia, edited by K. Morrison and L. Junker, 105-128. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Muriuki, G. 1974. A history of the Kikuyu, 1500-1900. Nairobi: Oxford University Press. Nangendo, S. M. 1994. Daughters of the Clay, Women of the Farm: Women, Agricultural
24
Economic Development and Ceramic Production in Bungoma District, Western Province, Kenya. Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis: Bryn Mawr College.
Prins, A.H.J. 1961. The Swahili-speaking peoples of the east African coast. London: International African Institute. Robertshaw, P. T. and D. Collett. 1983. “The identification of pastoral peoples in the archaeological record: An example from East Africa”, World Archaeology 15: 67-78. Roscoe, P. 2002. “The Hunters and Gatherers of New Guinea”, Current Anthropology 43(1): 153-162. Sadr, K., 2003. “The Neolithic of southern Africa”, Journal of African History 44(2): 195-209. Schrire, C., 1992. “The archaeological identity of hunters and herders at the Cape over the last 2000 years: a critique”, The South African Archaeological Bulletin 47(155): 62-64. Schrire, C. and Deacon, J. 1989. “The indigenous artefacts from Oudepost I, a Colonial outpost of the VOC at Saldanha Bay, Cape”, The South African Archaeological Bulletin: 105-113. Schmidt, P.R. 1997. Iron Technology in East Africa: Symbolism, Science, and Archaeology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Smee, T. and H. Hardy. 1811. “Report of a Voyage to the Eastern Coast of Africa From Bombay, 1810-1811, in the Honourable Company Cruiser Ternate and Frigate Sylph, Cpt. Thomas Smee and Lt. Hardy Commanding”, Presidency of Bombay Proceedings [I.O. L/MAR/C/586.]. Soper, R. 1965. Notes on a Visit to the Taita Hills. Unpublished Manuscript. British Institute in Eastern Africa, Nairobi, Kenya. Soper, R. 1976. “Archaeological Sites in the Chyulu Hills, Kenya”, Azania XI: 83-116.
25
Sutton, J.E.G. 1998. “Engaruka: an irrigation agricultural community in northern Tanzania before the Maasai”. In Archaeological Sites of East Africa: Four Studies, edited by J.E.G. Sutton. Azania XXXIII: 1-37.
Terrell, J.E., J.P. Hart, S. Barut, N. Cellinese, A. Curet, T. Denham, C.M. Kusimba, K. Latinis, R. Oka, J. Palka, and M.E. Pohl 2003. “Domesticated Landscapes: The Subsistence Ecology of Plant and Animal Domestication”, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 10(4): 323-368. Thorbahn, P.F. 1979. The Precolonial Ivory Trade of East Africa: Reconstruction of a HumanElephant Ecosystem. Unpublished Ph. D. Dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Wakefield, T. 1870. “Routes of Native Caravans from the Coast to the Interior of East Africa”, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 40: 303-338.
26
