Objects in the Swahili World

The stone towns of the Swahili coast define and embody both contemporary Swahili society and the ways that the archaeology of that region is known. The series of large-scale projects that have explored their architecture and changing material culture provide the means through which the past is conceived, even though these stone towns were themselves a particular material expression of a broader eastern African society, linked through networks of trade and interaction from earliest times. Urban centres provided the setting for the practices and lifestyles that came to be construed as Swahili, and twenty-first-century stone towns such as Lamu, Mombasa, and Zanzibar are still the quintessential expression of coastal culture. Stone-town excavations therefore structure our understandings of ancient Swahili materiality, and explorations of the wider society use these urban trajectories and developmental sequences as their reference point for exploration of the broader context. The objects of the Swahili world, reviewed in this chapter, are therefore presented through the archaeology of some of the more prominent stone-town excavations that together have defined our understandings. Rather than offering a comprehensive review of the archaeology of the coast (for which see Horton and Middleton 2000; Kusimba 1999b), this chapter discusses the material settings of the town. After a brief consideration of these key excavations, discussion focuses on themes in the study of Swahili materiality, and the ways that this has been conceptualized. Objects are implicated in understandings of identity from two angles, first as a reflection of some kind of ethnic identity, and second as part of the practices of daily life and the ways that people have constructed the urban social world. These discussions introduce more sites into consideration, and attempt to position them with relation to material understandings. The Swahili world presents itself as a ‘material culture’, in which objects are and were crucial to the performance of social roles and the construction of the urban environment. The evidence suggests that the Swahili themselves have long manipulated the material world to create a certain form of urban life, which defines and also creates certain types of person and activity.

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Context (archaeology) · Excavation · Expression (computer science) · Geography · Identity (music) · Linguistics · Materiality (auditing) · Swahili · African history and culture studies · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History