 Good afternoon everyone and a very warm welcome on this chilly day to the Society of Antiquary's first pre-public lecture of 2021. I'm Heather Sabir and I'm the honorary secretary of the society. And it's my pleasure to be doing the introductions today. I'm just going to tell you a little bit about our society to start with in case we've got anyone who's not familiar. We were founded by a very small group of antiquarians in 1707 who famously met in a London pub the Baratavren for the purpose of investigating and debating material remains of the past find in Britain. As we grew in numbers we were awarded a Royal Charter by George III in 1751 and charged with the encouragement advancement and furtherance of the study and knowledge of the antiquities and history of this and other countries. At the same time we were given rooms in Somerset heist shared at that time with the Royal Society that allowed us to heist and care for a growing library and museum collection and hold meetings for fellows to discuss and debate their research into the material past. We moved into Burlington heist in Piccadilly in 1874, where we continue to focus on fellowship conservation research and dissemination of our work. Today we're a society of over 3000 fellows of the members are called fellows as I'm sure you know, and we remain focused on our core objectives and as a registered charity, we're committed to sharing our collections and our work to the public, which we do through public lectures like this one today, public tours, exhibitions, scholarly research seminars, and a program of publications. And as many of you know we're currently running a campaign to try and ensure our sustainability at our premises in Burlington Heist and Piccadilly. And if any of you are interested in finding out any more about that please do visit our website. Now before I introduce today's lecture just a little bit of high scooping. This will be a question and answer session at the end. If anyone would like to ask a question, please type it in the chat function on your zoom, and I will ask the questions at the end of the session at the end of the lecture. Please do try and hold your questions till the end of the lecture, as it can be a little distracting if they come through while the speaker is giving their talk. Thank you. Today's lecture is called belief and belonging daily life on the medieval Swahili coast by Dr Stephanie when Jones FSA. Dr when Jones is a senior lecturer in African archeology and deputy head of archeology at the University of York. She has been a fellow of the Society of Antiquities since 2016. Stephanie has worked in Eastern Africa for 20 years, including three years as assistant director of the British Institute in East Africa. Her work focuses in particular on the times of the Swahili coast, and she has an interest in urbanism, architecture, Islam and material culture. So over to you Stephanie. Thank you. Thank you very much. So I'm going to start by sharing my screen and let's hope this works. Can you see me can you give me a thumbs up if you can see the slide and see my screen. Yes. Okay, that's all good. Okay, well so thank you very much for that. And thank you all for coming along to listen to my talk. And I'm talking today about rather sunny a part of the world. I'm going to take you off to the medieval Swahili coast. And in particular, I want to talk about my excavations at the site of Songomnara, which is on the southern coast of Tanzania. It is what we call a stone town, a coral belt townscape of the approximately the 15th century. It was occupied in the late 14th century and abandoned in the early 16th. So it was occupied over a century, maybe 150 years at the very peak of the Swahili urban tradition, which is a tradition that we find all along the Swahili coast. And excavations at Songomnara really do two things. We have excavated on many places across the site. And we've also used a whole suite of methods to try and understand the ways that people were moving through the site and using the spaces of the town for different things. And I'm going to try and give you a sense of that today. And really, this is a unique level of detail for a Swahili town where we've never before had that kind of understanding about what daily life looked like, the ways that people actually lived, what they did in their houses, how they got their food, how they processed their food, where they ate. All these sort of basics of daily life were things that we didn't previously know. And as I said, we have also excavated and used a whole series of different methodologies at Songomnara to try and explore the ways that people use space. And so talking about Songomnara is also an exercise in talking about methodology and thinking about the ways that we can layer up different archaeological methodologies to try and get a really rounded sense of what was happening in the past. So I'm going to situate you in place and time, but I'm going to do this far more quickly than the subject deserves really, because I don't want to run out of time. The Swahili coast of East Africa is Africa's Indian Ocean coast, so it stretches over about 2000 kilometers from Somalia in the north all the way down to Mozambique in the south, but with really a cluster of archaeological sites along the Kenyan and Tanzanian coast. That coastline is home to a series of settlements, which are very similar in lots of ways. They share this similar sort of chronological and cultural trajectory. And they've been in contact for many hundreds of years via the sea. So people have been sailing up and down this coast and they've been sailing further afield into Indian Ocean networks as well. The coastline was first settled in around the sort of 7th century AD, although you can discuss, people have found earlier sites, but the sites that we see as the sort of ancestors, the earlier sites of the Swahili tradition started at this time and were strung along the coast. From the very start, they were connected into Indian Ocean networks and they were trading particularly with the Persian Gulf, and we find traces of this turquoise glazeware ceramics across these sites, suggesting that right from the beginning, they were integrated into economic networks with the ocean. But they were also really integrated with the African hinterland and there were many cultural aspects, including elements of the ceramics, the material culture, the ways that people lived in houses, and also the Swahili language or the ancestors of the Swahili language that tie these sites to the African hinterland and sort of demonstrate their really African character. From that period, some of these sites continued to be occupied over a very long period of time, and we get a development through into the second millennium AD into the Swahili stone town tradition, where we start seeing architecture built from coral actually, this is coral that's either found in rubble underground or is mined sometimes from the living reef and shaped into architectural forms, which came to define these townscapes. And as I said, some of these are developments of earlier towns, places like Shanga, which was the subject of major excavations in the Lamuocopelago, but in other cases, more towns were founded in the second millennium, and we get sites like Geddy in Kenya, where we have this very rich and fabulous coral architecture that make up these townscapes along the coast, and from the 11th century onwards, really, we get the building of mosques, tombs built out of coral, and also these very grand houses, sometimes known as palaces, which sort of really came on the scene from about the 13th, 14th century. And so there's this very long urban tradition on the Swahili coast that connected into the Indian Ocean Network, but they are an African society, and we see this sort of gradual elaboration of the townscapes over time. And some of the sort of very early sites of this tradition are quite famous, and they're well known to tourists, if you've ever been to the coast of Kenya, you've probably been to Geddy. Another very famous site that I'm going to allude to today is Kilwa Kisiewani in Tanzania, which has some of the finest standing architecture on the coast, things like this domed mosque, which dates to the 14th century, this part of the mosque anyway, although it was originally an 11th century foundation. And then, sort of moving through time, these stone towns, these 11th to 15th century stone towns, are the ancestors of a later stone town tradition that comes with Omani colonialism of the 18th and 19th, particularly the 19th centuries, and developed into these stone townscapes in places like Zanzibar, obviously famously Zanzibar stone town, what is the world heritage site. And other places like Lamu in Kenya, where we get this, where we have a sort of long standing stone town tradition, which is now developed into these very Omani flavored towns where people still live today. So we have a very long urban tradition on the Swahili coast, it's got sort of different character at different periods, and yet it's very poorly known actually historically. There are no indigenous written histories in the pre-colonial period. And instead, what we have in terms of written history are a series of mentions, really, and this is not the full list, but it's some of the more famous people that have mentioned travel to the East African coast. And so we have mentions in travellers' accounts, in geographies, right back to the Periplos of the Eritrean Sea, which is the first century Greco-Roman document, which talks about a metropolis in the land of Ezania, which has yet to be identified, but then some much more sort of familiar landscapes are described by Arab travellers of the 10th century onwards. And they are talking about places that they visited for trade or stories that have come back from people that have visited for trade. And they testified to an Islamic community on this coast, and also to these very rich sort of ports of trade to be found across this region. And yet it's a very partial record. We don't have a very full picture of what life was like on the Swahili coast just because somebody visited in the 10th century and mentioned that there was a town there and that there was some Muslims. And so we sort of turn to archaeology to tell us some of the more sort of indigenous stories, some of the more sort of comprehensive stories about how life was structured on the Swahili coast. But the historical sources do have this sort of effect, which is to shape the ways we think about the coast in terms of the way they were looking outward. And actually I think that this very sort of partial historical record actually has quite a significant effect in the ways that people have thought about the Swahili coast over time as we've studied it. And the emphasis has often been on these trading connections on the on the ways that they were integrated into the Indian Ocean world and to the experiences of outsiders coming into these towns, rather than the experiences of the people that lived within them. And one of the things which has also shaped this is the fact that the Swahili themselves have at times emphasised those sort of external connections. And there's a history to this. There's all sorts of reasons why emphasising external connections would be useful at different points in time. But it's quite a long standing trope on the Swahili coast, and going back to what are called the chronicles these indigenous histories, which would originally have been oral traditions that relate to the towns. And the earliest one that was written down was actually the Kilwa Chronicle, which was transcribed by the Portuguese when they arrived at the beginning of the 16th century. And in which they talk about the founding of Kilwa, but they talk about it as having been founded by a brother or family who came from Shiraz in the land of the Persians. And there's this sort of trope about how the towns of the coast are a product of that external trade. And it's a trope that the Swahili themselves have bought into the long term. And this story of brothers coming from Shiraz, this kind of Shirazi foundation myth, has been replicated at many towns along the coast. And there is, so there has been an archeology as well, thinking about how these towns became integrated into Indian Ocean trade, what they traded, who they traded with, and connecting the dots around the Indian Ocean, and by looking at trade goods within the towns and some of the earliest archeologies on the coast were really sort of doing that work of trying to position this in these economic networks and in time and space, thinking about who they were trading with and why. But I don't want to go too deeply into that because I want to talk about something a little bit different. What my interest has been has been in trying to think about it from the other side so trying to stand on the African continent as it were, and think about sort of what's what's in it for them, and why are people reaching out to connect with these Indian Ocean networks, these Islamic networks, and how does that fit into practices of daily life in an African context. So I'm going to take you to a place called the Kilwar Archipelago, which is on the southern coast of Tanzania. And hopefully you can see in the bottom right hand corner, and it's actually it's a series of very small islands in a drowned estuary on the southern Tanzanian coast and they're all just immediately offshore. And so you approach these islands from Kilwar Masoko, which is a much later town, it's a British town, but you can cross to Kilwar Island, and with Kilwar, which means Kilwar on the island, which is the site of one of the more famous Swahili stone towns. And Kilwar was actually the subject of major excavations in the 1960s by someone called Neville Chittick, who was the director of antiquities of Tanganyika became the director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa. And he excavated out many of the major monuments of Kilwar on quite an industrial scale. As you can see, he had Durkaville trucks to take all the earth away. And what he recovered at Kilwar was the record of a town which had this very elaborate 14th century manifestation with this very glamorous mosque with large palaces. With an incredibly large palace actually called Hisuni Kubwa, which is unparalleled anywhere on the coast, as well as some very grand stone houses, tombs, a whole sort of urban townscape, together with a lot of evidence for external trade. But what he also found in a few places on the site, because it wasn't his main interest, was that beneath this townscape there were earlier layers going back to the 9th century of successively more humble, I suppose, towns, back to a Wattlendorf built settlement of the 9th century, where there were very few trade goods, although there were some, and there was evidence for iron smelting and the production of ceramics and people living in Wattlendorf houses. And so he sort of opened the door to later archaeologies, which were able to sort of trace that indigenous development of this urban tradition. So at Kilwar there's this very long standing town and really we can think of the peak as being this 14th century moment when a lot of the most elegant and glamorous architecture was built. And also when Kilwar was at the peak of its trading powers, when we find the most trade goods. And it's also a period when Kilwar seems to have been channeling gold from southeastern Africa from Zimbabwe, from the Zimbabwe Plateau out through the Mozambique coast and up into Indian Ocean trading networks. So Kilwar was really at its height at this time. But Kilwar was not the only town in the archipelago. And actually there's a series of other settlements around the Kilwar archipelago, which date to different periods in this sort of long standing urban tradition. And so on the islands around Kilwar. There's also the site of San Giacatti, which dates to the 11th century and 12th century, and maybe sort of up into the 13th century and then is abandoned. And we don't know a huge amount about San Giacatti, although there are some stone structures there. But then the place that I'm interested in are on Songomnara Island, you can see further to the south, the site of Songomnara and San Giamma Joma, which is a smaller site on the same island, which actually date to this moment, the peak of Kilwar's prosperity and growth in the 14th century. And so we have this sort of long trajectory at Kilwar and then we have these shorter trajectories at different towns in the same archipelago. And so Songomnara represents this sort of moment, which is the peak of Swahili urbanism at Kilwar. And one of the reasons to go there to excavate was to try and sort of understand that moment. And Songomnara is wonderful for this because it is not a long standing site, there's not a very complex deep stratigraphy at this site. Instead, there's quite complex horizontal stratigraphy at this site. And there's a lot of standing buildings, we've got a very good grip on the town plan on the ways that things were laid out. And because it was abandoned in the 16th century, instead of continuing in occupation like Kilwar, we also have some very good preservation of in-situ deposits across the spaces of the town. So we went to Songomnara, I went to Songomnara as part of an excavation project which was designed to look at spatial practice across the town. So Songomnara was the ideal place for this. So it was a project that ran between 2009 and 2016. At least the excavations did, I would say it's still running now because we're still trying to write it out. It was directed jointly with my colleague Professor Geoff Fleischer at Rice University in the US. And we were interested in exploring the archaeology of daily life across this long 15th century at Songomnara. And we did this by, with a whole series of methodologies, both inside and outside the spaces of the town. So if we had to divide it, I was quite interested in excavating the houses. And Geoff was quite interested in the open spaces, but really they form a bit of a continuum, thinking about the ways people moved in and out of the houses of the site. And just to give you a sense of some of the range of methodologies that we brought to bear here, which grew year on year, we kept suddenly adding more. And in fact, one year the Society of Antiquaries funded us to do some geophysical survey across the site, just sort of adding into the melange of different methodologies. But so we did a lot to map space. So we did mapping across the island landscape. And if you look in the bottom right hand corner, it's not clear what you're looking at. But actually all that orange blur is a whole series of small orange dots, each one represents a small shovel test pit, dug at 50 meter intervals across this whole island landscape to think about how activities spread out from the town and spread out a lot. And we did laser scanning to map all of the standing architecture to create an accurate town plan. And we did survey, as I said, we did geophysical survey so with magnetometry and electromagnetic survey across all the open spaces inside the town walls. And we also then did shovel test pits inside the town walls on a grid across the open spaces. So we had this sort of scalar approach where we did them at 50 meter intervals in the landscape, five meter intervals across the open spaces in the site. And then actually 50 centimeter intervals inside the houses. And then those pits gave us an insight into the artifacts as you're going to see. But they also gave us soil samples where we did geochemical analysis, which enabled us to look for the residues of activities in different areas of the site. And we then excavated, of course, so we excavated a whole series of houses, and we did sampling you can see one of our sampling grids here on 50 centimeter intervals across the floors, and everything we excavated, and we tried to recover botanical and both charred seeds, macro botanical remains, and also phytolith these microscopic remains of plants that you've that you find under the microscope back in the lab. And we recorded all the fauna from across the site we excavated the mosques. And obviously we've been studying all the artifacts and we're able to think about where those artifacts were placed around the site. And, and we've also back here in York done a whole series of bioarcheological analyses, thinking about isotopes in the bones of both humans and animals, so that we can think about the diets that they were eating. And so we can, we can sort of connect the crop, the crops and the animals that are available on the site with with the diet of the actual humans and and animals. I'm not going to give the results of absolutely everything that's on this screen because I cannot. Instead I'm going to talk about three main themes that have come out of all of this. And the first one and probably maybe the biggest one is just trying to get our head around understanding the site the ways people move through space, what they did what their priorities were. And then of course need to talk about the houses themselves and what people were doing inside them. And, and finally, I'm just going to refer briefly to thinking about objects, and particularly to thinking about value and the ways that people were valuing different types of artifacts on the coast. And, as I said, Songamnara is a site it's on the sort of northwestern tip of Songamnara Island, and in just to the south of Kilwa Kisimani. And the site itself actually had been mapped in the 1960s and by an archaeologist called Peter garlic who used a plain table and cited in the architecture all around the side. And one of the humbling things actually about scanning everything by laser scanning to centimeter accuracy was that almost everything mapped directly on to what he had done with a plain table in 1961. And, but what we were able to add to that was a fuller understanding of the environment of the site which I think he had not been able to get his head around with the way that he was looking at the remains. And in particular, I want to draw your attention to the town wall, which is in gray on this map. So you're looking at the sort of spaces of the site with all the standing architecture in blue. And, and the town wall in gray, sort of wraps around the northwestern side of the site, some parts of it we picked up under the ground using geophysical survey, some parts of it still stand above the ground. But by adding it on to the map, and we were able to think a little bit more about the ways that the ways that movement was funneled through the site itself. So just to give you a little bit more context, and you can still see the town wall, but off to the West is mangrove. There's actually a shoreline. And now it's completely choked with mangrove, but it would have been an open beach and this was the way that people entered the town from the sea. And so, so once we've got the wall there and we can sort of map that opening in the wall to the West, you can start to think about the ways that people would have come into the town, and actually the way that the town was constructed in order to shape that experience of the people coming in. And I'm also just going to draw your attention on this map to the open spaces that we've mapped around the site, and which we began begun to sort of delineate and between the northern open space created up at the top there between those houses in the wall. There is large western open space which you're going to hear more about just inside the entrance to the site, and the central open space which is sort of created by the curving of the houses in the center. And what we get from some of the results of the fight list studies here is that these spaces also had a different character, and in particular that northern space seems to have been full of woody plants so it might have been full of fruit trees. It might have been just sort of trees for shade, and but certainly we can think of that as being somewhat more of a sort of grove of trees, and to having more sort of woody cover. Whereas the central open space and the western open space were dominated by grasses, so they were probably much more open, and you can think about people moving much more freely here and also being able to see much more freely across. So this is just putting you onto Google Earth, so that you can sort of see the site as it is now, and with those mangroves off to the West, and you can see where the shoreline is. But by, by sort of thinking about that movement into the site we can start to sort of think of the ways you would have entered the site and delineate some different sort of spaces, which have been created by this layout. So, and this these images are actually from an article published by my colleague Jeff, if you want to chase it further, and you can read more about the open spaces of the site, and about all these numbers. But number one is as you're coming into the site imagine the mangrove is not there, and you're coming towards the entrance to the site. And as you can see as you're facing the things that are to your right and left are a thing called the stepped narrow mosque, and the mosque and cemetery to the south. The narrow mosque which is mostly derelict at this point, and is a very small structure built on a little island in the tidal area, just off the side so at low tide you can walk to it and at high tide it's on an island. And so as you were approaching the site is it would have sat, sort of, you know, sticking out into the sea it would have been something that you would have approached before, before you really got to the town and it would. It would almost have been a sort of signal that you were getting close to the town. And also when you look at these mosques you have to remember that in the 15th century they would have been covered with bright white plaster and they would have been these very sort of beautiful buildings that might sort of jump out at you a little bit more from the undergrowth than they do now. And to the other side you've got the mosque on the hill, which has an associated cemetery, and it sort of stands up, as you can see in the bottom left hand corner here. It's on a hill, you can't see the hill but the hill sort of leads down into the site so it again would have been very prominent as you're approaching the site so you would have come towards the site with these two mosques on either side of you, sending a very clear message about the kind of people that might live here. You then reach number two, the entrance to the site, and you can see that the gateway, the opening in this wall, is flanked by two more mosques. There's so many mosques. And we've excavated or we've cleared these mosques as well just to think about the plan of them and the chronology of them and how they developed. And actually the shoreline mosque, the one to the north of this opening, is really interesting because the door actually opens out towards the shoreline. So it's as if this mosque was designed for people who were coming in from the sea, whether they were fishermen, or whether they were travelers arriving from overseas. So there's this real sort of powerful message which is being given to you as you first arrive at this site and head towards the gate, flanked by these two mosques. Here's the entrance out towards the sea. And I don't think I've got an image of the southern mosque, it's less impressive. You then enter into this western open area, which Jeff, as you can see, has called a public space because it is deliberately maintained. It's not an accident that there's this open area as you enter the site. And in fact, what you've got from that public space as you enter is a couple of really clear sight lines across the site. One is to yet another mosque, which is the central mosque, which is straight ahead of you as you come in there. And it's again raised up so it would have been a very clear sort of sideline. The other is to the southeast towards the palace complex, which is actually, who knows if it was a palace, what that might have meant, but it's the largest, the grandest house on the site, which is often called a palace. And you can see, actually, these palm trees would not have been there. So you have to imagine that they're gone. So this is the view straight across the side straight across this really open space towards the mosque. And then this one perhaps is a bit clearer towards the palace. And you can see you're facing directly onto the door of the palace. The first one I'm trying to say here is that you can see that there's there's some planning that has gone into the development of this town plan. And the planning is has created a set of visual associations as you enter this site from the sea. And I probably should point out that the local people would not always have entered this site from the sea, although they might sometimes. But we know from our survey they were using the island landscape really widely. But there is certainly an approach here and thinking has gone into setting up the ways that you experience that site as you approach it. And there's a real emphasis on highlighting Islam in the structures of the town. So moving on to look at some geophysical survey and what you're looking at here is a magnetometry map of the site. And you can see there are sort of dark blobs. And these are magnetic anomalies. And hopefully if you squint at them a little bit, you can see that in that Western open area, we were astonished to discover the dark blobs made a rectangle. And there's a really clear, a really clear sort of set of features going on there, which also help us understand maybe this maintained space, this open space to the west of the site. And when we excavated all these little shovel test bits all across here on a five centimeter five meter grid. Some of the things that were in those pits gave us some hints as to what was going on. In particular we found a lot of baked door. So you can see that those lines of dark blobs to the north and south of the Western open area are actually associated with a lot of baked door, and which would have been housing material, and which has since burned or collapsed and been buried. So, so actually this Western open area and was yes deliberately maintained. Yes, these site lines were deliberately maintained, but it was also quite a busy space full of occupation. And I'm going to come back to what kind of occupation that was. We also got some more information from the geochem pits which help us to sort of populate the spaces of this site, and including phosphorus which is a really good indication of organic matter decaying organic matter. And you can see that there are some really high readings in the area around the edges of the houses. And we have associated this with people keeping animals and probably stabling their animals in really close to the house and probably sheep and goats based on what we find in the fauna record. And so already this sort of beautiful pristine townscape, and you can start to imagine it full of what and all houses areas of activity, animals being kept sort of in and around the spaces of those buildings. And we also found some elements which had a clear association with some of our spaces so sodium for example, and was really strongly associated with that open area to the West. And we don't fully understand it because these, I have learned that soil chemistry is not a one to one thing where you find sodium and you know there was salt. But we do suspect that maybe the processing of marine resources was going on here whether it was drying seaweed, drying fish, mending nets, people were probably bringing things in from the sea and using these open spaces for those kind of purposes. Okay, so moving on through the space and we then reach numbers four and five, which as you'll see are in this sort of central space, where we've got a whole series of graves and tombs. And they're quite difficult to see but hopefully you can start to pick them out in the foreground. You can see some quite basic head and footstones and relating to some of the simpler graves. And you can also see some sort of rectangular tomb structures, which overlay some of the graves at the site. And this central area is absolutely heaving with graves everywhere you go you're tripping over graves, and this space was very much used as a cemetery and the focal point of the whole site really was this cemetery, and it's associated mosque. So this is all the dots a little head and footstones that we were able to map. And you're looking at sort of rectangular tombs and then there's this other mosque in the center of the site. And I just want to draw your attention to the sort of, I don't know if you can see my cursor but the rectangular shape to the southwest of this central mosque, which is a walled graveyard which is also full of head and footstones. And so we've got the all these sort of burial spaces right in the center of the site. And, and we excavated some of them we actually did excavate some of the skeletons but I'm not going to talk about those today. But we also excavated around a lot of the tombs just to try and think about what people were doing in this space. And we found that they were absolutely covered in offerings. And so the team that you just looked at actually the fight a list showed that people were laying palm from on the ends of that tomb and we were able to pick up the fight list from those from even 500 years later. And on another actually very simple grave you're looking at the head, head and footstones here. And we find we found thousands of quartz pebbles which had been brought in and laid on the ground surface over this tomb, presumably all as individual offerings. And yet this you can start to imagine that people were traveling to these tombs they were remembering their ancestors they were remembering maybe holy people, and that this space in the center of the site was actually used for these kind of practices and it was central really to the life of the town. So back to that mosque which we also excavated, which Mark Houghton excavated for us in the center of the site. And one thing that was also interesting about that mosque was that we found that when they had built this mosque, they'd actually moved the wall of the graveyard. There had been an earlier extension of the graveyard, and which they had taken away and they built a new wall to make space for the mosque, which suggests the graveyard was there first. And actually one of our working hypotheses is that the graveyard might have been one of the first things on the site, and that this site actually began as something of a sort of holy site it was a place for burial, and a place for memorialization, and that then became the focus for a whole sort of spin off settlement of Kilwa and on some of now. Okay, and then the final thing to say about the spaces, and about which I've talked a lot, and is that if you move to number six on the map, and you look at the spaces from the houses. There's evidence that those central spaces were really emphasised by the inhabitants of the site because all of the doors and all of the staircases are pointing down towards those tombs towards that mosque, and really towards that sort of central space and the places where their ancestors were buried. And here you go you can see that view across the tombs in the central open area. I'm running out of time, as I always do. So I'm going to move on quickly to talk about the houses and hope to make it to the objects. So we excavated a whole series of houses at the red one the ones in red were excavated in total and the ones in green we just excavated certain rooms, trying to get a sort of cross section of the site. And this is house 18 which is one of the ones we excavated in total, and I've tried to do something similar to what was done with the open spaces just to sort of take you through a journey into the house a little bit. One of the things we showed was that the entry space into these houses was quite a quite an important space. It's not unusual for Swahili houses because they often have these sort of seating areas by the door and places that, you know, might be sort of the liminal space between in and out and so you might meet guests here. They're not actually coming into the spaces of your house. So this is backed up by a whole range of a very rich architectural record, some of which fell down the drains that we have in the plaster floors in these houses, and showing that this was a really busy space and that people were moving around and living through these spaces quite a lot. And what we also found was a whole series of buried offerings under the doorways of houses. So this is a bit of an uninspiring picture, but actually what we found was a buried pot with shell in it under the doorway of the house. And this is something that we know ethnographically in East Africa and the leaving of offerings of finger pots inside doors as a sort of protective charm and as sort of protecting the sanctity of the house and really sort of enforcing that transition between interior and exterior. Moving into the house, when, when you move into the houses of Songhamnara, the first space you move into is a stepped court number two. And these are very glamorous spaces. They're the most elaborately decorated spaces in the houses. You can see that the architecture itself is very intricate. It's full of a lot of carved coral. And they have these kind of sunken stepped courts, which presumably were used for sitting. And we excavated, we excavated a couple of these, but in house 18 we excavated the whole house, the whole court, and down to what was a packed earth floor at the bottom so you had these stone and coral and plaster steps leading down to what would have been a bright red earth floor. And what was great about this courtyard was that it turned out to be full of some very glamorous ceramics that were associated with sort of high status eating there are bowls and sort of painted bowls decorated bowls, as well as imported bowls and coming from the Islamic world, suggesting that these courtyards was spaces for eating not for cooking they're not sort of worker day courtyards. These were places where people were sharing food. And that's an interesting finding in this sort of first space where you first come into the house. You can think of it as a space where people are offering hospitality potentially to guests, either from outside the town or from inside the town. And then when we excavated in the other rooms around the house, and we actually found that once you get past that court, there wasn't so much distinction. So a lot of the other rooms are actually really multifunctional and so that court has this sort of special place, and then the other rooms of the house, more very mixed there's a lot of, and there's eating going on in them there's some cooking, there's burning of incense and wood and non food crops, and there's probably sleeping and storage, and but there's not a lot of differentiation between them. And this actually matches with some of the access analysis we've done in the house which is thinking about the ways people use space, which really sort of singled out the courtyard as a very particular space this kind of place that everything led on to, and yet all the rooms around it are somewhat similar in how easy they are to access, how easy they are to access each other, how private they are. And so we don't have a lot of sort of differentiation between the other rooms, we just have these kind of special spaces. I don't want to overrun. So, I'm not going to spend too much time talking about the other spaces of the house, but I will just say that that one that at some narrow it was quite rare to find any sense of change over time. So in this one century, and most of what we found, artifactually sort of looks pretty much the same, and radio carbon dating doesn't have a very good definition in the 15th century so it's very difficult to sort of pull out process. But one place we were able to see change at the time was actually in this court. And so we're standing here in the court looking towards one side, where actually there's a secondary wall that was built just underneath where you see SM 55. So they walled in a particular room. They did that because they were building a second floor above it, at which point that room became a kitchen. So we can actually see a sort of shift in the ways people lived by moving some people upstairs, and whether they were guests or whether inhabitants of the house they were moving to a sort of different space and more private space. And simultaneously you get this sort of repurposing of some of the rooms downstairs, away from this very sort of communal, elegant space and towards creating sort of functional spaces and where probably servants were cooking food. Probably a generous term. Okay, and so I'm not actually going to talk about the courtyards which are number five. And, but we also then looked in the courtyards which happened, which are at the rear of all the houses and we did sampling across them. And we found also a whole series of outdoor spaces associated with cooking with water storage, and but also with crafts like the spinning of cotton, and we found a lot of evidence for spindle wells, suggesting that people were making thread in these spaces and that that was sort of built into the domestic life of the house. And all of this is quite interesting because the Swahili house now in or in the 20th century and I, and I guess still now but there are, there are, is it is an important mechanism for sort of social the negotiation and the presentation of social status, and it is sort of as a very private clean space associated particularly with rate with women and with female seclusion. And actually everything we find at song and Nara from the 15th century suggest that this was not the case. And that in fact, the houses were really multifunctional spaces. They changed over time you can see different relationships coming out. But they were places where people came in and had grand meals. They were active economic units where people were spinning cotton. They were networked into other spaces of the site. And we also find a lot of domestic activity outside the doors so that was sort of spreading out. And so this sort of a private female sense of the house is something which seems to have come in later centuries or at least to have developed in later centuries. And I really am out of time so I'm afraid I'm going to skip the Waterland or houses which is a shame because I know you were all probably here for them. And but I'm just going to finish by talking about objects, and because I really just want to give one example about objects. As I said, one of our interests in going to song and Nara was to think about how people on the Swahili coast really experienced life. And part of that was thinking about value, like this, this sense that people have been involved in overseas trade for many years, suggest that they value those objects or food stuffs, or the status that came from that trade. And what we wanted to do was to try and fit that into some of the local schemes of value. And we started by looking at local objects. And one of my favorite sets of objects that we recovered with these, they are arrogant beads. So they're created from the shells of a giant clam. That's where arrogant comes from. So somebody was diving onto the reef, pulling up a giant clam and a big giant clam. And then making these beads. And we found them in a buried deposit under the floor of one of the houses of song and Nara we found these eight large arrogant beads. And actually these very deposits were under the floor of several of the houses where we, where we happen to look. And in one of these locations in another house, we found a coin hoard of Kilwa coins together with Carnelian beads, probably from Gujarat, which a necklace presumably which had also been buried. And what this and Kilwa coins are a local tradition they were minted locally at Kilwa, we have silver we have copper which is more common actually. And there are some gold issues which are known. And, but they circulated sort of very locally, they were a local form of currency that was being exchanged locally within the town. Coins in themselves are fascinating, because they've taken this idea from the Islamic world. They've brought it in and they've domesticated it and they're minting their own coins, the weight standards don't line up with the Islamic world. They've got their own iconography they've got their own style, and they, they carried value locally. So already we've got this sort of domestic economy of value in the Kilwa coins. But once we find them in a buried deposit a store of value, which is equivalent to the arrogant beads, it also sets up these relationships of equivalents like if a, if a buried set of coins is a store of value, then a buried set of arrogant beads seems to be as well. And the reason I like the arrogant beads is that they're so local. They come from giant clams which live in the reef of Kilwa, which is also these bones represent the fact that this is also where they got most of their food they were fishing and they were eating marine mammals. So they are a very sort of local form of value a bit like Kilwa coins. And they're also a local technology they were actually napped. So, we found the debris from the manufacturing of our might be they're made on site, and they were creating them by napping them like stone tools almost. And so we've got this local technology a local material and a local form of value, which seems in this instance to function in a similar way to the local coins. And so you can sort of start to think about the ways that foreign ideas foreign forms of value beads the carnelian beads that we found in the other house, sort of fitted into some of the local value systems local beads, local ways of sort of valuing particular objects and not and that they might have sort of held value for that reason, not just because they were shiny and came from the Persian Gulf. Now I'm sorry to have rushed at the end. And but I wanted just to sort of whiz through. And my major point I think today was to talk about how archaeology is of daily life actually a way of moving beyond some of the instrumental understandings of this region which have been based on the spread of Islam just thinking about when and where, which sect and the actions of merchants who they were trading with. Instead, and exploring daily life lets us into sort of new understandings of the priorities of the town, the values of the town. And, and the reason I called the talk believe from belonging is that I think it really highlights the importance of Islam in the structuring of daily life around the town. And it gets into sort of what, what Islamic life was like in the 15th century, not just was it Islamic or not, but like how did that structure the spaces and the activities of the town. And, and belonging also captures the fact that those ancestors who were buried in the middle of that town were really important. And the whole sort of town is built around the investment of those people in the ground. And, and I think there's this real sort of sense in which the urban community is created through that permanence and that investment in the center. And I hope that by understanding this kind of thing at Samrim Nara, we can move back up to try and sort of rewrite some of the bigger picture narratives, which don't tend to give agency to African actors. They've just recipients. Whereas if we sort of start trying to think about how it fits into daily life, then I hope we can sort of feedback to tell those big stories in a different way. Thank you. Thank you so much, Stephanie. That was fantastic. I certainly learned a lot. And you made it all so clear as well. Thank you very much indeed. And now I hope our audience site there will start asking you some questions. Could I maybe start off by just asking about, we were joking about you warming us up earlier on, but is it a very stable sort of, it's almost on the equator, isn't it? Is it a very stable climate? Close to the equator. And it's stable in that you have this more or less same number of hours of sunlight every day. But it's on the monsoon system of the Indian Ocean. And so there are two periods of rains. There's a short rains starting roughly now, running through for a month or so. Sorry, the long rains starting roughly now and running through for months or so. And then there's a short rains in our autumn. But there's also, I didn't talk about this, but in the Indian Ocean, the monsoon also brings a sort of shifting set of currents. So you get a wind and a current that blows from different directions at different times of the year. So there are very cool seasons when the wind is blowing onshore and there are much hotter, more humid seasons when the rains are coming and no wind is coming from anywhere. Yeah, well, no, yes. You tend to think it's very stable, but not necessarily. Yeah, well, things like the sunlight are very stable. I actually had a student who did some shade analysis looking at which areas of the site had most shade to see if it correlated with activity. And actually, we found that it didn't, because the sun was so overhead all the time, it actually didn't tell us very much about the site at all. Fair enough. Okay, we have got some questions coming in now. First of all, Karence Lewis just said, thank you very much, but she had to go. Susan Vincent would like to know if local people today realize how important the discoveries are. Yes. So people on the Swedish coast are definitely very invested in their past, whether they realize how important these discoveries are, is probably on me. I actually had a humbling experience recently and I went back to Kilworth and I met a lot of the people who'd worked with us for a different project. And everyone said, and at the time we gave lots of talks and everything. And then everyone said, well, we've got no idea what you found. Why didn't you write a book? And I realized that actually the answer might be no. It's not that they, it's not that locally they don't have a sense of their past, people are very proud of their urban past. But in terms of presenting the archaeology, I think we've got a job to do there. And actually one of my plans now is to try and create a book in Swahili, which just tells the story of Kilworth and Sangamnara in a way that actually can be told locally. I'd love to say yes, they all think we're great, but actually it turns out they don't know what we were doing. And Morris would like to know if any isotope analysis. Sorry, I've just lost it off my screen. Did any isotope analysis indicate where the early inhabitants came from? Not here, the isotopes. So we've done carbon and nitrogen isotopes to think about diet. Strontium isotopes which might get us into origins actually are not all that effective if people are just moving around on the Swahili coast because the geology is very similar. So carbon and nitrogen just told us that they, a bit about their diet, they had a very fish heavy diet, lots of C4 plants, which is not that surprising because lots of African plants. But no, they didn't get us into origins. At Sangamnara, I'm 100% sure that these people came from Kilworth. But the story of Swahili origins is a more vexed question. And it's probably not for me to answer from these data, but certainly it's a society with a very strong African roots, these people were African, coming from the African mainland. But where there's been a lot of mixing over time and there are actually now DNA studies coming out from this sort of period which is showing the impact, both of migration from sort of deeper parts of Africa, of men particularly travelling across the Indian Ocean. Good. Kate Clark says great talk. You talked about the space at Sangamnara, but how did those spaces change over time? I think you said one of your colleagues might be studying that, did you? Space is difficult, as I said, the chronology is really difficult to unpick at Sangamnara because the radiocarbon calibration curve is very flat over this one century. And because there is so little vertical stratigraphy, that's the one thing that's very difficult to think about. So the only places really we've seen change over time are that graveyard which was changed, we sort of see it in the structure. So again, in that house where the second floor was added, we are actually at the moment trying to pick out places that we might date that might tell us more. But at the moment it's difficult to see a lot of change over time. It was built very quickly, it was occupied for a century, and then it was abandoned when the Portuguese arrived in the early 16th century. Yeah, it's a shame. And Panama also wanted to know, was there any evidence of weaving? No, but I suspect they were weaving. So we've got lots of spindle wells, so we know they were spinning. And I guess a loom weight would be a larger spindle well. When we first found those aragonite beads, actually we wondered if they were loom weights. But I don't know because now we've got this sort of sense of them maybe having been more valuable, might have been jewelry, it's sort of hard to tie them to weaving. I'm actually really interested in the archaeology of fabric and how we know that fabric was really important here. They were importing fabric, they were clearly making cotton, and yet that archaeology is really elusive. And I'm quite interested in trying to think about that exact question, what would that evidence look like? Mark Hall says thanks and wants to know about the exploitation of the coral, was it expedient or were there other factors and has it had any long-term environmental impacts? Well, I can tell you that in the oral histories they say that people took so much coral from the reef to build Kilwar and Songarumnara that they actually cut off the sea between the islands that they previously used to be joined. But no, so most of the buildings that you see here are built from coral rag, which is sort of dead coral, which actually is the substrate which you could dig up. So I guess mostly it's expedient. Then they used live coral, Paraitis coral, for the architectural features because you can carve it, it's quite soft. They did that more at Kilwar, but a lot at Songarumnara, sort of around the doorways and the arches. So it was a combination. Whether it's had a long-term environmental effect, I actually don't know, and I'd be interested to know. I suspect not. I suspect there's a lot of other things going on at the moment, which having a larger effect on the coral reefs of East Africa, because ultimately these towns are not enormous. But I could be wrong, I'm guessing. Mark's got several aspects to his question, but I know he's particularly interested in board games. I wonder if you find anything that hinted to play of board games? No, not directly. There's a few small shaped things that could be gaming pieces made out of various objects, like rubbed down ceramic sherds or stone, but they could also be the first step in a spindle world. It's hard. What we haven't got is those sort of bow boards and things where you get the hollowed out cupules and that kind of thing. We don't know. Fair enough. Fair enough. And then Radka Palova wanted to know if the site tells us anything about the relationship between disease, urban spaces and trade networks. Gosh, that sounds like another lecture. It does, actually. And there is evidence now. There are studies now happening about thinking about the plague and connections with some of the sites and site abandonments, particularly the Justinian plague and site abandonments in East Africa. But here, specifically here, we don't know. We don't have a lot. The only thing I can say is that we have a suspicion that when the Portuguese arrived, they brought something nasty because when we excavated the burials, actually, we found sort of top layers that were full of quite young children and babies. And there was obviously a sort of moment when children began to die at Songrimnara not long before they left. But the nature of those kind of diseases is there was nothing in the bones to suggest what killed them. But no, sorry. Fair enough. And I'll make this the last one. How does it relate to your work related to Great Zimbabwe? Well, it's not at all. Great Zimbabwe, obviously, is another urban centre based on a very different sort of economy, a really pastoral cattle based economy in the Zimbabwe plateau. But we do suspect that the rise of sites like Great Zimbabwe was linked to the availability of trade networks through the Swedish coast. And there are Indian Ocean trade goods at Great Zimbabwe that sort of testify to that connection. And particularly at Kilwa because it was associated with gold coming out through Mozambique and it was known to have dominion over parts of the Mozambique coast. That gold was probably coming from Zimbabwe. And so there probably is a direct connection there, actually. But I mean, there were sort of two separate places caught up in this same economic system. Thank you so much. That was really very interesting and so many different aspects. Thank you. I'm sure everyone was very interested. Thank you. Okay. There's too much to say. Absolutely. There's not too much too bad. It's not too bad. And just remains for me to tell everyone about the next public lunchtime lecture which would be on Tuesday the 9th of March at 1pm. When we're going to hear a talk entitled the Reverend Joseph Hunter FSA and the Legend of Robin Hood by Dr. David Crook FSA. And our next evening lecture is this Thursday 11th at 5pm. And we actually have a change to our advertised lecture. In fact, our own president for Drury is going to be speaking and his topic is environed about with galleries and towers. Archbishop Warren's Palace at Oxford. And I'm sure that'll be a treat for architectural historians and archaeologists alike. And don't forget everyone that if you can't tune in at the actual time that there's the lectures are all on our YouTube channel and you'll find a wealth of other delights on there as well from previous years. So thank you again very much to Stephanie and thank you for joining us and we look forward to seeing you all again soon. Thank you. Thank you.