TY - JOUR
T1 - Coastal subsistence, maritime trade, and the colonization of small offshore islands in eastern African prehistory
AU - Crowther, Alison
AU - Faulkner, Patrick
AU - Prendergast, Mary E.
AU - Quintana Morales, Eréndira M.
AU - Horton, Mark
AU - Wilmsen, Edwin
AU - Kotarba-Morley, Anna M.
AU - Christie, Annalisa
AU - Petek, Nik
AU - Tibesasa, Ruth
AU - Douka, Katerina
AU - Picornell-Gelabert, Llorenç
AU - Carah, Xavier
AU - Boivin, Nicole
N1 - This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way
PY - 2016
Y1 - 2016
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - fishing
KW - Iron Age
KW - Late Holocene
KW - Mafia Archipelago
KW - maritime adaptation
KW - Pre-Swahili
U2 - 10.1080/15564894.2016.1188334
DO - 10.1080/15564894.2016.1188334
M3 - Article
VL - 11
SP - 211
EP - 237
JO - Journal of Island & Coastal Archaeology
JF - Journal of Island & Coastal Archaeology
SN - 1556-4894
IS - 2
ER -