J Fleisher
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 19095 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | J Fleisher |
| NOMBRES | J |
| APELLIDO | Fleisher |
| FIRMA | FLEISHER J |
| AFILIACIONES | Rice University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6505-9666 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 51 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 604 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 51 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2004 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 15 |
Petrographic insights into Indian Ocean earthenwares
Hunting, Fishing, and Herding in Later Stone Age and Iron Age Zambia
Our Reviewers
An archaeometallurgical investigation of iron smithing in Swahili contexts and its wider implications
This paper presents the most extensive archaeometallurgical study of iron-smithing debris excavated in East Africa. It presents an integrated methodology, including morphological, chemical, petrographic, and contextual analysis of iron slag excavated from secondary ironworking contexts. Iron slag from three Swahili sites was analysed-Unguja Ukuu located on the southwestern coast of Zanzibar, and Tumbe and Chwaka situated in the north-east of Pemb…
Assembling Islamic practice in a Swahili urban landscape, 11th-16th centuries
Spanning c. 1050-1500 CE, a burgeoning Swahili community called Chwaka built a sequence of four mortared coral mosques in their town of wattle-and-daub houses on Pemba Island, Tanzania. The mosques' placement, construction, and use played an active role in creating and strengthening an Islamic community and help us define changes in social practice within the town and the larger polity in which it existed. It is argued that the construction of ea…
The Chronology of Kilwa Kisiwani, AD 800–1500
Glass Beads from Songo Mnara, Tanzania
Diet, economy, and culinary practices at the height of precolonial Swahili urbanism
Swahili cuisine is known across Africa and globally as a highly distinctive product of a cosmopolitan, coastal, urban society. Here we present a comprehensive study of precolonial Swahili diet and culinary practices at the coastal town of Songo Mnara, positioning archaeological and ethnographic understandings of cuisine in a long-term coastal tradition. We explore contemporary food cultures and then present the first direct evidence for precoloni…
Exploring Swahili urbanism through survey of Songo Mnara Island, Tanzania
This paper offers a mesoscale approach to the study of the urban landscape surrounding the fourteenth–sixteenth century Swahili site of Songo Mnara just off the southern Tanzanian coast. The study is based on a systematic, intensive survey of the town’s immediate island hinterland. Such an approach, we argue, exposes a set of activities that extend out from the urban core and situates the traditional objects of study (urban center, rural villages…
The Archaeology of Emptiness? Understanding Open Urban Spaces in the Medieval World
Using examples from medieval Europe and Africa, an approach to understanding urban open spaces is proposed. We argue that new digital and high-resolution methodologies, combined with interpretive frameworks which stress the affective capacities of the material world, call for a reappraisal of open spaces as places of disruption, creativity, and emergent urbanity. We advance an intensive approach to create a methodological basis on which to reimag…
Eastern African Coast
This chapter offers an overview of historical and archaeological research on Islam and Islamic practice on the pre-colonial eastern African coast during the late first and early second millennium ce. Due to the visible remains of mosques, tombs, and other stylistic elements influenced by the Islamic heartlands, researchers have always regarded Islam as important to the emergence of Swahili coastal towns. In this way, the archaeology of the Swahil…
Capturing People on the Move
No such thing as invisible people
This paper seeks to challenge the notion of the invisible slave in the archaeological record and investigates the way in which material culture may reflect the movements and practices of enslaved labourers on the East African Swahili coast. Archaeological approaches to enslavement have revealed the nuanced and complex experiences of a group of people often under-represented or absent in historical records, while also grappling with the challenges…
Conclusion
Speaking with Substance
The gathering of Swahili religious practice
This chapter explores the development of mosques and Islam on the coast, situating the emergence of the first coral-built mosques by 1000 ce and their constituent materials. It examines the nature of co-constitutive entanglements, as possible demonstrations of devotion or a quieter means of building in local powerful forces in the context of a foreign religious locale. In general, by 1000 ce, the Swahili world expanded outward, as they become mor…
When Did Feasting Emerge on the Eastern African Coast? New Perspectives from Historical Linguistics and Archaeology
Developments in Rural Life on the Eastern African Coast, a.d. 700–1500
The eastern African coast is known for its Swahili “stonetowns.” Archaeological study of stonetowns has overshadowed that of Swahili rural life, and how it reformulated in the context of urban transformations after a.d. 1000. To help redress that imbalance, we focus here on village research carried out in a Swahili heartland—Pemba Island, Tanzania—in the context of two archaeological projects. We feature four settlements: later 1st millennium Kim…
Tumbe, Kimimba and Bandarikuu
Tumbe, Kimimba and Bandarikuu - 1
Town and Village
The Mosques of Songo Mnara in their Urban Landscape
The 15th century Swahili town of Songo Mnara (Tanzania) had six mosques—an unusual quantity for a town of only 7 hectares and a population of 500–1000 people. Largescale archaeological investigations of two previously unstudied mosques, and detailed survey of the remaining four structures has suggested a complex pattern of Islamic practice in the town, including a dynamic relationship between mosques and burials, an emerging sense of social diffe…
Population and ceramic traditions
M’Mbogori’s monograph offers a new and important intervention in the long-standing debate concerning eastern African Tana Tradition pottery. The core question of this volume is whether Tana Traditi
Geoarchaeology of urban space in tropical island environments
The multiple territories of Swahili urban landscapes
Houses are linked to the urban landscape in multiple ways. They provide urban form, and shape movement and interaction. This article analyses these connections through the concept of territories, defined as areas linked to particular activities and/or groups, at the fourteenth–sixteenth-century Swahili town of Songo Mnara. Detailed excavation and survey at the site has provided information on ritual and economic activity within and between househ…
Town and Village
When Did the Swahili Become Maritime
In this article, we examine an assumption about the historic Swahili of the eastern African coast: that they were a maritime society from their beginnings in the first millennium C.E. Based on historical and archaeological data, we suggest that, despite their proximity to and use of the sea, the level of maritimity of Swahili society increased greatly over time and was only fully realized in the early second millennium C.E. Drawing on recent theo…
Ceramics and the Early Swahili
Rituals of Consumption and the Politics of Feasting on the Eastern African Coast, AD 700–1500
The early Swahili trade village of Tumbe, Pemba Island, Tanzania, AD 600-950
Indian Ocean maritime networks have become a special focus of research in recent years, with emphasis not only on the economics of trade but also the movement of domesticated plants and animals (see Fulleret al. inAntiquity2011: 544-58). But did such contacts inevitably lead to radical social change? Excavations at Tumbe reveal a settlement of the late first millennium AD that was heavily engaged in the traffic in exotic materials and may have be…
Swahili Synoecism
Archaeological survey in 1999–2000 in the northern part of Pemba Island, Tanzania, has revealed the role of rural settlements in the development of Swahili towns from A.D. 750 to 1500. The survey investigated the regions directly surrounding three towns to explore the political, economic, and religious relations between towns and surrounding villages. Results of the survey suggest that the growth of Pemban towns, although economically influenced …
Authorisation and the Process of Power
Finding Meaning in Ancient Swahili Spatial Practices
Thinking Across the African Past
Deciphering public spaces in urban contexts
Geophysical Survey in Sub‐Saharan Africa
Magnetometry and Slingram electromagnetic surveys were conducted at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Songo Mnara, Tanzania, as part of a multinational programme of investigation to examine the uses of space within and outside of this stonetown. The town was a major Islamic trading port during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The surveys detected significant evidence for the containment of activities within the town walls, and previously u…
Beyond the Stone Town
Coins in Context
Coinage occupies an unusual position in archaeological research. Thriving scholarship on numismatics and monetary history ensures that the objects themselves are well-studied, often seen as an indication of chronology and of stylistic and commercial links. Yet coins might also be analysed as artefacts, and explored as part of the symbolic world of material culture through which archaeologists understand meaning and value in past societies. Using …
Performance, monumentality and the ‘built exterior’ on the eastern African Swahili coast
This paper explores the way that open spaces in ancient Swahili towns were part of a monumental landscape based on the performances that occurred within them. By exploring the physical arrangement of open space through the placement of monumental and other buildings, it is argued that some Swahili open spaces might be understood as a 'built exterior': places where meaningful activities and performances were enacted, enhanced and framed by their m…
The multiple territories of Swahili urban landscapes
Houses are linked to the urban landscape in multiple ways. They provide urban form, and shape movement and interaction. This article analyses these connections through the concept of territories, defined as areas linked to particular activities and/or groups, at the fourteenth–sixteenth-century Swahili town of Songo Mnara. Detailed excavation and survey at the site has provided information on ritual and economic activity within and between househ…
Bead grinders and early Swahili household economy
This paper focuses on a specific class of locally made artifacts known in the archaeological literature of the eastern African coast as bead grinders. Bead grinders are discarded potsherds or stone cobbles distinguished by long grooves abraded into their surfaces. Although they are some of the most commonly located artifacts on late first-millennium AD coastal sites, few close analyses of them have been conducted. Here we examine a particularly l…
Geoarchaeology of urban space in tropical island environments
Geophysical Survey at Kilwa Kisiwani, Tanzania
Geophysical survey at Kilwa Kisiwani, southern Tanzania, has recovered evidence for several aspects of town layout and the use of space within the town that enhance our understandings of this important Swahili site. Although excavations in the 1960s recovered substantial monuments at this stonetown and traced a chronology for the development of the site from the eighth to the sixteenth centuries AD, the overall site layout has remained poorly und…
Diet, economy, and culinary practices at the height of precolonial Swahili urbanism
Swahili cuisine is known across Africa and globally as a highly distinctive product of a cosmopolitan, coastal, urban society. Here we present a comprehensive study of precolonial Swahili diet and culinary practices at the coastal town of Songo Mnara, positioning archaeological and ethnographic understandings of cuisine in a long-term coastal tradition. We explore contemporary food cultures and then present the first direct evidence for precoloni…
A deposit of Kilwa-type coins from Songo Mnara, Tanzania
A deposit of coins was recovered during excavations at Songo Mnara, Tanzania, containing over 300 copper Kilwa-type coins. This is the first deposit or hoard of these coins found in a well defined archaeological context and it therefore offers a unique glimpse into both the typology of these coins and their contemporary uses. The ramifications of the Songo Mnara deposit are discussed. In particular, the deposit is firmly attributable to the end o…
Fifty years in the archaeology of the eastern African coast
Research on the archaeology of the coast of eastern Africa is closely associated with the earliest days of the British Institute in Eastern Africa and in many ways quickly became synonymous with the Institute's journal — Azania. This is not surprising given that Neville Chittick, the first Director of the Institute and initial editor of Azania, was most actively engaged with research on the eastern African Swahili coast. Since those early years, …
Assembling Islamic practice in a Swahili urban landscape, 11th-16th centuries
Spanning c. 1050-1500 CE, a burgeoning Swahili community called Chwaka built a sequence of four mortared coral mosques in their town of wattle-and-daub houses on Pemba Island, Tanzania. The mosques' placement, construction, and use played an active role in creating and strengthening an Islamic community and help us define changes in social practice within the town and the larger polity in which it existed. It is argued that the construction of ea…
Glass Beads from Songo Mnara, Tanzania
No such thing as invisible people
This paper seeks to challenge the notion of the invisible slave in the archaeological record and investigates the way in which material culture may reflect the movements and practices of enslaved labourers on the East African Swahili coast. Archaeological approaches to enslavement have revealed the nuanced and complex experiences of a group of people often under-represented or absent in historical records, while also grappling with the challenges…
Exploring Swahili urbanism through survey of Songo Mnara Island, Tanzania
This paper offers a mesoscale approach to the study of the urban landscape surrounding the fourteenth–sixteenth century Swahili site of Songo Mnara just off the southern Tanzanian coast. The study is based on a systematic, intensive survey of the town’s immediate island hinterland. Such an approach, we argue, exposes a set of activities that extend out from the urban core and situates the traditional objects of study (urban center, rural villages…
The Archaeology of Emptiness? Understanding Open Urban Spaces in the Medieval World
Using examples from medieval Europe and Africa, an approach to understanding urban open spaces is proposed. We argue that new digital and high-resolution methodologies, combined with interpretive frameworks which stress the affective capacities of the material world, call for a reappraisal of open spaces as places of disruption, creativity, and emergent urbanity. We advance an intensive approach to create a methodological basis on which to reimag…
The Archaeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa
The Archaeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa. By Timothy Insoll. Cambridge World Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xv, 470; 125 illustrations. $95.00 cloth, $37.00 paper. Timothy Insoll's detailed overview of archaeology of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa can be read as both an encyclopedic summary of Iron Age archaeology as well as a challenge to begin thinking about archaeology of religion and religious practice. In ma…
Bead grinders and early Swahili household economy
This paper focuses on a specific class of locally made artifacts known in the archaeological literature of the eastern African coast as bead grinders. Bead grinders are discarded potsherds or stone cobbles distinguished by long grooves abraded into their surfaces. Although they are some of the most commonly located artifacts on late first-millennium AD coastal sites, few close analyses of them have been conducted. Here we examine a particularly l…
Swahili Synoecism
Archaeological survey in 1999–2000 in the northern part of Pemba Island, Tanzania, has revealed the role of rural settlements in the development of Swahili towns from A.D. 750 to 1500. The survey investigated the regions directly surrounding three towns to explore the political, economic, and religious relations between towns and surrounding villages. Results of the survey suggest that the growth of Pemban towns, although economically influenced …
Rituals of Consumption and the Politics of Feasting on the Eastern African Coast, AD 700–1500
Authorisation and the Process of Power
Ceramics and the Early Swahili
Geophysical Survey at Kilwa Kisiwani, Tanzania
Geophysical survey at Kilwa Kisiwani, southern Tanzania, has recovered evidence for several aspects of town layout and the use of space within the town that enhance our understandings of this important Swahili site. Although excavations in the 1960s recovered substantial monuments at this stonetown and traced a chronology for the development of the site from the eighth to the sixteenth centuries AD, the overall site layout has remained poorly und…
Beyond the Stone Town
Finding Meaning in Ancient Swahili Spatial Practices
Coins in Context
Coinage occupies an unusual position in archaeological research. Thriving scholarship on numismatics and monetary history ensures that the objects themselves are well-studied, often seen as an indication of chronology and of stylistic and commercial links. Yet coins might also be analysed as artefacts, and explored as part of the symbolic world of material culture through which archaeologists understand meaning and value in past societies. Using …
Thinking Across the African Past
Landscape Archaeology
This handbook provides a comprehensive and up-to-date synthesis of African archaeology, covering the entirety of the continent's past from the beginnings of human evolution to the archaeological legacy of European colonialism. As well as covering almost all periods and regions of the continent, it includes a mixture of key methodological and theoretical issues and debates, and situates the subject's contemporary practice within the discipline's h…
Ceramics and Society
The Ceramics and Society dataset (Wynne-Jones and Fleisher 2013) includes a database that documents the analysis of over 2,000 potsherds of the Early Tana Tradition (ETT), a 7th-10th century ceramic tradition found along the eastern African coastline and hinterland. The dataset contains 40 variables for each sherd, including those related to vessel shape, materials, decoration and finishing and production attributes. Referee statement by Paul Lan…
Performance, monumentality and the ‘built exterior’ on the eastern African Swahili coast
This paper explores the way that open spaces in ancient Swahili towns were part of a monumental landscape based on the performances that occurred within them. By exploring the physical arrangement of open space through the placement of monumental and other buildings, it is argued that some Swahili open spaces might be understood as a 'built exterior': places where meaningful activities and performances were enacted, enhanced and framed by their m…
The early Swahili trade village of Tumbe, Pemba Island, Tanzania, AD 600-950
Indian Ocean maritime networks have become a special focus of research in recent years, with emphasis not only on the economics of trade but also the movement of domesticated plants and animals (see Fulleret al. inAntiquity2011: 544-58). But did such contacts inevitably lead to radical social change? Excavations at Tumbe reveal a settlement of the late first millennium AD that was heavily engaged in the traffic in exotic materials and may have be…
Swahili Urban Spaces of the Eastern African Coast
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Water Management in a Maritime Culture
The complexity of public space at the Swahili town of Songo Mnara, Tanzania
Geophysical Survey in Sub‐Saharan Africa
Magnetometry and Slingram electromagnetic surveys were conducted at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Songo Mnara, Tanzania, as part of a multinational programme of investigation to examine the uses of space within and outside of this stonetown. The town was a major Islamic trading port during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The surveys detected significant evidence for the containment of activities within the town walls, and previously u…
A deposit of Kilwa-type coins from Songo Mnara, Tanzania
A deposit of coins was recovered during excavations at Songo Mnara, Tanzania, containing over 300 copper Kilwa-type coins. This is the first deposit or hoard of these coins found in a well defined archaeological context and it therefore offers a unique glimpse into both the typology of these coins and their contemporary uses. The ramifications of the Songo Mnara deposit are discussed. In particular, the deposit is firmly attributable to the end o…
Situating the Swahili house
A focus on locating and exploring the temporally deeper roots of the Swahili towns, the search for Swahili origins, became an important research topic, and continues to be so today. Local discourses on identity and meaning, actively engaged in by the Swahili themselves, as well as other local intellectuals, offer a much more nuanced and historical understanding of the Swahili past, and thus a cautionary tale of the way that ethnoarchaeology can s…
Conservation, community archaeology, and archaeological mediation at Songo Mnara, Tanzania
During archaeological fieldwork at Songo Mnara, a UNESCO World Heritage Site on the southern Tanzanian coast, a storm caused the collapse of a graveyard’s retaining wall. The process initiated by the rebuilding of that wall serves as a case study in addressing the dialogue among researchers, community members, and national and international organizations concerning heritage. During the process of rebuilding the wall, the Village Ruins Committee w…
Deciphering public spaces in urban contexts
Fifty years in the archaeology of the eastern African coast
Research on the archaeology of the coast of eastern Africa is closely associated with the earliest days of the British Institute in Eastern Africa and in many ways quickly became synonymous with the Institute's journal — Azania. This is not surprising given that Neville Chittick, the first Director of the Institute and initial editor of Azania, was most actively engaged with research on the eastern African Swahili coast. Since those early years, …
When Did the Swahili Become Maritime
In this article, we examine an assumption about the historic Swahili of the eastern African coast: that they were a maritime society from their beginnings in the first millennium C.E. Based on historical and archaeological data, we suggest that, despite their proximity to and use of the sea, the level of maritimity of Swahili society increased greatly over time and was only fully realized in the early second millennium C.E. Drawing on recent theo…
Global Maritime and Colonial Histories (45 obras) · Archaeology (40 obras) · Geography (36 obras) · History (34 obras) · Swahili (29 obras) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade (28 obras) · History (24 obras) · Sociology (19 obras) · Linguistics (18 obras) · Tanzania (16 obras)