Viewing stonetowns from the countryside: An archaeological approach to Swahili regional systems, AD 800--1500 (Tanzania).

摘要

This dissertation offers an evaluation of the urbanity of a series of Swahili towns on Pemba Island, Tanzania—called ‘stonetowns’ because of the presence of stone-built elite and ritual structures—by searching for and describing countryside settlements spanning the 8 th to 16th centuries AD. Swahili urbanism has been explained generally as the result of increasing participation in long-distance trade, with stonetowns functioning as mercantile or administrative centers. From these stonetowns, elites are thought to have expanded their authority over rural populations through the accumulation of wealth. A crucial way of evaluating these urban functions is through the analysis of regional settlement patterns, and comparisons between material from rural and urban settlements.; To these ends, this dissertation uses data from archaeological survey and excavations in the region surrounding three known stonetowns to reveal the rural ‘hidden majority’ of ancient Swahili society by describing the types of, and variations in, rural settlement. Changing patterns of regional settlement are then used to document a demographic shift during the 11 th century, from dense extensive regional settlement in villages, to intensive, centralized settlement in towns thereafter. These data, alongside comparative production and subsistence data, demonstrate that Pemban stonetowns were indeed urban based on the complex functions that stonetowns provided for regional populations—as ritual and merchant centers; managing Islamic practice on a regional scale, but also ‘producing’ prestige through participation in long-distance trade with Indian Ocean merchants, and with other stonetown elites along the coastal corridor. This suggests that the emergence of hierarchy in some stonetowns may have been the result of the interaction and competition between polities and the growing ritual authority of elites over regional populations, and not simply the introduction of foreign goods, increases in wealth, and greater controls over the surpluses of others. Elites' attempts to manipulate long-distance trade goods may have been based on their desire to draw countryside populations to the towns, legitimizing and expanding their power. This questions the image of elites emerging based purely on their accumulation of wealth. In fact, although their wealth was symbolized in things, it may have resided most importantly in people.