 Welcome everybody to the Ecological Research Facilities Wednesday brown bag talks for the ARF. Let me begin with acknowledging our place and our privilege here because we're recording this talk to folks on YouTube at a later date. Every time we start something here, we should acknowledge that the Ecological Research Facility is located in the region. The ancestral and emcee of the territory of Chochenyo-speaking online people. Successive to the historic and sovereign barona band of Aleminic County who are here today, of course, we acknowledge that this land remains a great importance to the online people and that the ARF community inherits a history of archeological scholarship, scholarship that has disturbed the online ancestors and erased the online people from the presence of youth from this land, but not permanently, of course. It is therefore our collective responsibility to critically transform our archeological inheritance in support of online sovereignty and to hold the University of California accountable to the needs of all Native Californians, Native American and indigenous people with whom we work and who host us in their places. Today is my pleasure to introduce doctoral candidate Wolfgang Alder, who's done significant work in Zanzibar, on Isle of the coast of Tanzania in East Africa where he has been working with communities to look at the way their connections to the landscape are manifested in important material ways that have and potentially significant contributions to the way we think about Zanzibar in the future. Wolfgang's been pursuing this research now for eight years of work, you know, he's had various interventions through other research and then initiated his own community-engaged scholarship with the community there at Zanzibar in important ways contributing back, re-investing into the community. And I'm very excited to hear what we can think of as kind of an exit talk here in the Ecological Research Facilities, PhD community in the doctoral program from Wolfgang. So welcome. Sure. Thank you, June. Thanks for the introduction. It's great to be here as well. Thanks everyone for coming and speaking in person. Thanks everyone on Zoom as well. My talk is called Uneven Ground, the Archaeology of Settlement Reorganization in Zanzibar, Tanzania. Going to go over the outline of this presentation. First, I'm going to describe the context of where I work, the environment and social history of Zanzibar and Coastal East Africa. Then I'm going to discuss my research aims, questions and methods. I'm going to talk about something I talked about in my last brown bag, which was reconstructing the settlement system in Inland Zanzibar using archeological and historical methods. Then I'm going to extrapolate on that and kind of give an overview of where I'm at now and what I kind of feel like I've concluded from this phase of my research in this region for my dissertation, looking at ceramic trends, spatial analysis of settlement, zonal statistical analysis of environment in relation to settlement. And then I'm going to wrap it up by discussing some trends with respect to long-term settlement and environment. And I'll have a conclusion and the acknowledgement. So this is Zanzibar. It's the southern island in an island chain off the coast of East Africa. You can see here it's in the Western Indian Ocean. This is what's referred to by archeologists as the Swahili coast, extending from approximately Somalia to Mozambique. It also includes Northwest Madagascar, the Camaro Islands, and then a series of offshore islands of which Zanzibar is the largest. So it's today part of the modern nation of Tanzania. This is a closer up view of the island. Zanzibar, there are some modern towns that I've listed here. The biggest of which is Zanzibar Stone Town, which is the main urban settlement on the island. Using some satellite imagery, reclassified land use satellite imagery, I've reconstructed, this is basically modern settlement in 2016. So it's showing areas of houses and modern settlement. You can see the largest concentration is in the west here by Zanzibar Stone Town. There's also settlement in the rural areas, especially in the north part of the island northwest. There's also settlement on the coastal fringes, well as some but slightly less in the south. What you can see if you juxtapose this image of land use classification for modern settlement with the historical zone of the plantation system, you see how the arms of the historical zone really map onto modern settlement. So there's a landscape history in these rural areas that very much relates to the development of this plantation system in the 19th century. This plantation system developed primarily to produce cloves which are pictured up here on the left. Cloves are a spice. They were very valuable in the 19th century. Today, Zanzibar is still a large producer of cloves. Zanzibar and Pemba both produce a large share of the world's cloves. Towards the late 19th century into the 20th century, clove prices fell and the plantation system diversified to produce copra from coconuts. And so this plantation system was developed through slave laborers. So through these through enslaved, using the labor of enslaved mainland East Africans. Slavery was abolished on the island in 1890 when there was a transition to a system of kind of tenant squatters who were continued to be exploited in various ways to produce clove plantations. This is a clove tree. These are coconut trees. So what I wanted to know was what kind of landscapes existed in these clove plantation zones prior to the development of the plantation system and up to and during the development of the plantation system. What did the landscape look like? How were settlements organized? And how did that reflect or relate to broader trends of social transformation? I also wanted to investigate land use outside of the area specifically used for clove and coconut production. So in the Western regions, there's a lot of rice that's grown. Here's the rice fields. And in the East, there's a very different landscape running all down the East coast and into the south of the island. There are these Coraline limestone bedrock areas where the land is very rocky. There's very shallow soils. You can see just how rocky it is. There's pretty much no soil in this picture here. So what was settlement like across these areas and how did these different environmental contexts mediate? This is the survey strip that we planned. We executed the survey in 2019, a systematic survey across a region. And you can see that the aim was to capture settlement within the clove plantation zone as well as outside it in other areas. It is to reconstruct settlement across a variety of different environmental contexts. Just to go over now briefly, the periods of social reorganization that I wanna talk about that will frame the results of the survey and the results of my research. So Zanzibar is, there's a late stone age occupation period in Zanzibar that ends around 12,000 years before present when Zanzibar splits off from the mainland. And after that point, it's as far as we know today not occupied until about the sixth century CE when mainland East Africans, early Swahili people who were iron workers, agriculturalists, fishers recolonize the island and settle in these really small coastal villages, places like Fukushima. They also develop a relatively large town at Ambuja Koo which becomes interlinked into Indian Ocean trading systems in this period. But these are very coastal sites. They're directly on beaches in many cases and they're quite small except for Ambuja Koo which becomes a bigger site toward the end of this period. Going into the 11th and 15th centuries, the early second millennium, this is when there's a period of social stratification, urbanism, Islamic conversion across the entire Swahili coast, but on Zanzibar as well. So this is a period where stone architecture in the center of Swahili settlements that primarily comprised of earthen batch households but developed. But so you have, there are sort of nascent elites who are invested in constructing stone architecture, monumental mosques and tombs and things like that. On Zanzibar, the first one of these is this townscape at Tumbatu which also has relations with Krokotoni. On Pemba Island, other archeologists have related this period of social stratification to changes in diet. So there's a shift from pearl millet to rice consumption based on archeobotanical evidence during this time. There's also a shift in the type of ceramics being produced from primarily sort of jug shaped pots to open bowls. And other archeologists relate this to the idea of new kind of Islamic cultural norms about rice-based dishes in the Western Indian Ocean. So the idea being that nascent elites use things like communal feasting to kind of, to bring people together into these urban centers based around rice. So this happens in Zanzibar as well and I'll talk about that soon. Around the year 1500, there's a pretty dramatic settlement reorganization across East African coast when the Portuguese enter the Western Indian Ocean. So the Portuguese were interested in monopolizing trade. What was previously a series of independent and autonomous towns participating in the kind of early caravan trading and the trade with the Western Indian Ocean. The Portuguese wanted dominated, they wanted to control it and tax it. And they're mostly unsuccessful in this regard, but they do manage to disrupt settlement system. They sack a number of towns. So you have towns being abandoned during this period. There's also towns that are founded in which grow though. Some of the biggest cities in East Africa today are cities that were developed and were founded in this period. Zanzibar stone town here in the West is one of these towns. So it becomes in this period the primary urban site of the island. In the second phase of this early colonial period, the Yarobid and then Bousaid Omani dynasties pretty much replace the Portuguese system. They expel the Portuguese from the coast north of Mozambique and then they install governors in the cities and try to control and monopolize the wealth coming out of East Africa. And the same way the Portuguese did. Zanzibar becomes one of the central basis of the Bousaid Omani state as they contend with other factions in this early period. But still during this period, their primary presence is in stone town. That's not in the landscape. That's why I bracket this period around 1830. What changes in 1830 is what I'm calling the late colonial period. And this is when there's a pretty dramatic shift in how rural landscapes are occupied and used. So this is when you see the development of the clove plantation system. Outsiders referred to this period starting around 1830 or 1835 as this period of clove mania. Said Said, who's the first sultan of, or he's one of the most important sultans in this period, is the first to develop a clove estate basically on his plantation in the 1820s. By the 1830s though, he's encouraged a number of other Omani planters who were related to him to settle in the rural areas and to develop cloves because of how profitable the crops are. And so this period of clove mania refers to this episode where all across the island, other crops are being uprooted and not planted and left fallow to make room for clove trees. So in this period, Zanzibar becomes a net importer of staple foods for the first time. And there's also this account that there's like meteorological measurements done in the 1870s had to be, or basically it was remarked, they had to be redone from previous meteorological measurements in the 1850s because of how much the landscape had changed in that period in this mid 19th century period. So there's a lot of deforestation, a lot of changes to the real landscape. And this is where you see the establishment of what could be considered a plantation aristocracy of slave owning, Omani elites, also Swahili and Indian people as well, but mostly Omani Arabs who are controlling land and using the land to produce in a new type of way. So not just for subsistence, but for a kind of cash crop. The second phase of this is during the British, is when the British protectorate begins in 1890s, this continues to 1963 and ends with the independence of Zanzibar and the Zanzibar revolution which joins the island to Tanzania. But so as I'll talk about later, material evidence as well as these historical sources and the kind of spatial patterns that I observed in my analysis, all sort of corroborate that around 1830, there's a really fundamental transformation in the way that landscapes are used in rural areas that relates to both demographic changes as a result of bringing in mainland enslaved people as well as the kind of new economic system that develops with pro-plantations. Okay, so my research aims were to reconstruct settlement patterns in Zanzibar's plantation landscapes and in rural inland areas in general. I first wanted to, when I started my research, I wanted to look at how field systems work, I wanted to look at how agricultural changes could be mapped onto settlement shifts. And I realized quickly, well, there are no settlement patterns in the inland areas to even compare them against. Settlement has really been studied archeologically at coastal sites and it was first necessary to just reconstruct the settlement system landscaping in the inland areas. Next, I wanted to investigate rural settlement dynamics from a long-term perspective and theorize how these dynamics relate to episodes of social reorganization and transformation. So rural settlement dynamics, urban hinterland dynamics are things that get studied in different periods in Swahili archeology. In the pre-colonial period, there's a lot of research on this. And my aim was to kind of create a study that would link a long-term perspective together from the pre-colonial period phase of earliest occupation to the late colonial period. And then I wanted to broaden the view of historical ecology on the Swahili coast by integrating an investigation of agricultural environments. A lot of historical archeology focuses on coastal sites and focuses on marine resource subsistence and fishing. And I wanted, which is a very important feature of Swahili landscapes, but I wanted to also look at how agricultural environments and inland areas might have also related to these transformations. This leads to my research questions, which I'll go through as I think I go through the talk, but they basically relate to the aims. And there's different methods I use for them. So, but let's talk about the first research question. What are the settlement patterns in rural inland? Zanzibar from the period of earliest occupation to the late colonial period. That's my question here. So to do this, I first developed a systematic and judgmental survey in this region that I indicated before. This map shows the different survey transects we planned. The blue transects are systematic surveys selected randomly within the squares. The green squares represent areas where through collaboration with community partners, we developed a survey plan to investigate things of interest to local community members. In the far west here, we weren't able to survey very much. That's because modern sand and gravel mining has really denuded the landscape in this region. There's also mangrove swamps. So unfortunately, we couldn't get that part of the island, but I basically divided up the transects we could achieve into these survey regions which have particular environmental features. This is an example of how these transects worked, right? You can see this is kind of best case scenario here where we can do shovel test bits in a grid, use a grid system to delineate site sizes where we found archeological materials. Worst case scenario is in the east here, where it's not really worth the scenario, but it's just how it happened. The stony landscape means that you can't really dig shovel test bits. Up here in Kandwe, you can see, we got halfway through digging our shovel test bits and then we hit this kind of rocky area where it's just not possible. Also, the brush is very thick in this area, meaning it's staying directly in the transect is quite difficult. But anyways, as a result of this, this is the kind of final map I've produced showing the sites we've recovered, 44 sites in total, seven of the pre-colonial period, four sites dating to the early colonial period and 32 sites dating to the late colonial period and then two sites of indeterminate period. Dating these sites, for dating these sites, we mostly use ceramic typologies of imported ceramics, which is pretty well-established in East African archeology. And it let us pretty easily narrow down what period sites belong to. So I can go through these site types we recovered. I'm not gonna spend too much time on this since this is what I've discussed in a previous brown bag. I wanted to get more to the spatial analyses and ceramic analyses, but briefly, in the 11th, 15th centuries, there are these pre-colonial inland village communities at Wanakombo and Kirikacha. These are some of the largest sites we've recovered. They're sites with deep soils, lots of ceramic materials near perennial streams. There's also sites in the Eastern area in these sweetened field plots of modern farmers. So these are ceramic scatters. The best guess is that these represent areas of the same types of agricultural activity in the past. So they probably represent sort of a femoral or seasonal occupation in sweetened field plots in the same way that farmers today use in this landscape. And I'll talk about that more later. We also identified this coastal village up here at Wanakombo and Kirikacha, which I won't discuss much in this talk. Going into the early colonial period, or sorry, these are just some examples. Yeah, we can go back to these more people have questions later, I'm gonna skip ahead for now. In the early colonial period, in phase one, we're really just talking about the site of Kandui and then more of these ceramic surface scatters in the field plots of sweetened farmers today in the Eastern region. So the Western central areas are not occupied in the first phase of the Portuguese period of the early colonial period. Toward the end of this period, by the late 18th or early 19th century, there's a site of Nduaku, which is a small village occupied there. Some examples of these sites. I'm gonna go back to those later. And then in the late colonial period, there are really four different types of sites we identified. There are these ceramic scatters representing possibly small hamlets or field houses, areas of agricultural activity in the East and West. There are things that are clearly identifiable as sort of plantation estates, which stone architecture. And finally, there is the town of Chang, which is an immensely large site. 32 sites in general across all periods here. One thing to notice is the persistence of these types of sites in the Eastern region, which is something I'll return to later. Right, so here are these ceramic scatter sites. Estates, three sites really keep their economy wanna come from Catalania. I'm not showing this imagery of Catalania because it's a currently occupied house basically. People who there couldn't come speak with us we have basically not gonna publish the pictures of that. Anyways, moving along, this is the town of Chang. It kind of defeated our survey methodology, right? Because it's so big that the further you get out of this grid of shuttle test bits, the more you lose in these areas between the arms of the grid. The next way to reconstruct settlement, once you get to about 1890, we found is that archeological evidence for settlement patterns become less useful than the historical sources that start appearing pretty much right as the British seize Zanzibar and make it into a protector in 1990. What we found is this really, really interesting map called the, I call it the Khan Bahadur map. It's a map made by a person named Imam Sharif Khan Bahadur who was employed by the British Survey of India and published this map in 1907. It refers to settlements made, sorry, refers to surveys conducted across the island between 1890 and 1900, this is the approximation. And it shows a really, really fascinating view into the entire settlement landscape of the island, depicting villages, towns, things like streams and wells, roads and lots of other features. So it's this really fascinating trove of information for a period which really is at the height of the plantation system. And so it's pretty hard to not want to use this and compare it to archeological settlement. It's a different scale of analysis than the types of sites we're recovering. So it doesn't reflect things like small ceramic scatters, but it does reflect at a bigger scale the kind of village and town communities across the island and their distribution. So what I've done is I've interpreted this map using the typography of the map, which is a kind of standardized format in the British Survey of India, along with the sort of, with the density and quantity of settlement squares indicated by the author of the map. And so I've divided this up into site classes. This is a methodology I discussed more. We can talk about it later if people are interested how I actually got to this. But the point being that I think I'm pretty confident in being able to divide these up and estimate site sizes based on the information in the map. And this produces this really amazing kind of almost full coverage account of settlement on the island, which I can visualize the things like heat density. Showing Zanzibar stone town, town-side sites, large villages, small villages, and then hamlets are very small villages. Other features from the Kann Bahadur map that are really fascinating are place names listed in areas where there are no villages, right? So this suggests a really intense degree of familiarity between the author of this map who's working for the British colonial state, mind you, right? So there's, I'm currently researching more into this. I'm very curious to learn about the history of how these maps were made, the relationship between the map makers and local communities, right? How much this person was given access versus excluded from certain places. That's all very interesting. It's really, it's an image of a kind of imperial gaze on Zanzibar, right? And it's the development of that systemizing of the landscape, which we previous to this didn't really exist. But there are place names. There are the palaces in the states of the Boussayan rulers. And then there are miscellaneous things like sanatorium, poor houses, and ruins that are listed on this map, which are not listed in archeological gazettes. Also very interesting is the hydrological system. So I've traced this from the map, showing above ground streams and then well systems, pretty much in areas all around the places where there are no streams. I think reflecting the importance of water or settlement across the island. So that's kind of a summary of reconstructing settlement patterns using archeological and historical sources that operated different scales but show different types of evidence for settlement system. Now we can compare this to historical trends and episodes of social transformation and use different lines of evidence to see how these settlement systems relate to those periods. So how were these settlement systems impacted by and how did people negotiate with settlement transformation and political reorganization? I'm gonna talk about ceramic analysis and then spatial analysis of the settlement systems we've recorded. So the first line of evidence with ceramics is that there's a changing flow in the access to foreign commodities. In the pre-colonial and early colonial periods, there's a very small number of imported ceramic shirts coming from places like the Middle East and China. This is late scrafiato ware that's related to pre-colonial period from about 1100 to 1400 C.G. Later ceramics, around the 15th century, playswares, this is a long pancelladon from China. And in the 17th century, this is a sort of bachla ware of a black speckled type. What all changes around 1830 though, in the beginning of the late colonial period is the shift towards the increasing availability of a widespread range of European and Chinese ceramics. So specifically English white ware, which is hand-painted, sponge-decorated, transfer-printed, stenciled. And white ware replaces pearl ware in production between 1820 and 1830. The fact that we didn't find, I think, a single shirt of pearl ware, it really reflects the specific date of around 1830, which corresponds to this development of the coal plantation system. So these lines of evidence converge in that way. The next line of evidence with ceramics we looked at was the, with ceramic attribute analysis. So measuring things like ceramic temper, fabric color, and clay color in local ceramic wares. And the overall trend is from what I interpret as localized to regional production and possibly the influence of mainland East African potters who were brought as enslaved people in the early 19th century. So there's a shift from, so okay, so what I've basically noticed is that, like, temper and color seem to correspond in some way to geological and soil types across the island in the west central and east regions. The further west you go in Zanzibar, the sand viewer of the landscape becomes in general. So the far east has kind of silty clays, the central area is kind of sandy clay, and then the western area, it's clay sand essentially. And this, I noticed, corresponds to differences in coarseness in ceramic temper. So it'd be interesting to figure out where the actual sources of clay are coming from, but I suspect that the correspondences between geography and ceramic tempers reflects localized production of ceramics. And that seems to be the case elsewhere in the Swahili coast. I think this is data that kind of supports us at this regional scale. Toward the beginning in the Lake colonial period though, everything kind of becomes more, what's the word, consistent. Color of fabric and clay becomes darker in general, and then ceramics become finer and less coarse in general. And so I think this reflects some kind of change in the way that ceramics are being produced, the clays being sourced, that may reflect changes in the composition of potters, communities of potters, possibly reflecting more regional integration. Ceramic types also change. So there's a shift from the pre-colonial and early colonial period where open bowls dominate the assemblage, which is the case across the Swahili coast, to a phase in the late colonial period where these kind of averted rim, cairnated cooking pots become the central type of ceramic being produced, the main type. This miscategory here probably also a lot of you are from averted rim, cairnated pots. There are less diagnostic forms there. So this shift could relate to a few things. I think one, it mostly relates to the widespread availability now of imported open bowls, like this bowl here, which is an antique shop and then the bar dates to the late 19th century, which may replace the locally made ceramic bowls. It may also reflect changes in diet. Cassava, it's pretty well established that Cassava was introduced to Zanzibar in 1799. And Cassava becomes really the staple food of enslaved people on the island in the 19th century and becomes widespread then. So the shift may relate to something like new staple foods. Finally, it also may relate to the way that these pots are used today. So what you observe if you're in Zanzibar today is that averted rim cooking pots like this are pretty much the only locally made ceramic that's still used on a regular basis. And they're used in contexts where people are preparing food in places outside of the domestic household. They're also used in domestic household in some cases, but you often see them out in town as a kind of food cart stand where people are coming for lunch, coming to eat outside of the domestic household. So there's possibly some, this is just my theory that there's some relationship there where new economic conditions, new economic circumstances where suddenly there are lots of people working in contexts outside of their own domestic households produces a situation where there's a greater demand for things like bowls like this for provisioning workers and people like that, enslaved people. So now I wanna get into some of the spatial analyses that also correspond to changes related to the co-replantation system. The statistical analyses for settlement in the pre-colonial and early colonial period really just they reflect what you can kind of see with your own eyes because there are so few sites, right? This is a rank size graph. It has a convex pattern, which it basically reflects the relationship between site size and site rank. And so it's a way of visualizing how integrated or unintegrated sites were across the landscape. What a convex distribution like this suggests is that the largest site in the system is smaller than would be expected in what's called the law of normal prediction. And that smaller sites are larger than would be expected. So this suggests a relatively unintegrated or autonomous system of regional settlement. And I'll show you a different examples later. Clustering suggests a sort of dispersed settlement pattern. I think this accords well with other regions of the Swahili coast where the pre-colonial period is characterized by these kind of autonomous villages relatively unintegrated within the system not dominated by a central center. This is kind of a case in Pemba as well. Early colonial period, there's four sites, right? So this is to analysis or kind of just reflect what you can see. What's there to note here is that really the eastern region is the only area that remains occupied during the first phase of this period later on during who was occupied in the central region. So going into the late colonial period, there's a change though. Instead of a totally convex settlement system, we now have this thing called a primal convex or so that would out loud before it's been reading it, primal convex rank size system where there's still this kind of convex graph for the smaller sites in the settlement system, but now there's a very large site at the top. That's that town of Changi. There's also statistically significant clustering across the region. So there's two different changes, a change from dispersed to clustered and then a change from a convex settlement system to this primal convex settlement system, which I'm going to argue later, I think reflects the specific conditions of the plantation landscape. So this is all right, a theoretical model. It's all based on a kind of normative assumptions about how urban landscapes work. And I'm going to say that this reflects a very specific condition of the plantation system, which I'll talk about in a moment. If we move on now and compare these spatial trends to the settlement data from the map we discussed from about 1890 to 1900, right after the sites that we recorded archeologically, we see similar things. So analyzing settlement across the whole island, spatial clustering is very statistically significant at a variety of distances. And there's this similar primal convex rank size distribution for sites, mostly a convex system indicating this kind of persistence of supposedly autonomous villages, but now you have sands of our stone town, right? Which is the very top, which is kind of changing the graph. If we analyze this in different regions of the settlement system, we get a different view, right? So in the northern part of the island, it's a convex settlement system. There's clustering as well. In the central area where sands of our stone town is, we get this primal convex distribution. And then in the south, it's back to being a convex system as well with clustering too. So how to explain all this? Let's return to the research question. How do we explain these ceramic trends of the spatial analyses in terms of our question? This change from dispersed clustered settlement patterns. This reflects, I think, preferences for favored environmental zones. That's the main explanation I can see is that around 1830, because of this phase of agricultural transformation, there's a renewed emphasis on settling in and using zones that are specifically favorable for types of agricultural production, which results in spatial clustering as large numbers of people come into these areas for the first time who are brought as enslaved people. The second shift is this change from convex to primal convex distribution in size hierarchies. And what I suggest this reflects is the specific conditions of the plantation and landscape. So a convex ranked size distribution normally reflects something like autonomous settlements who are relatively unintegrated politically. But of course we know historically that wasn't really the case, right? This is a slave state essentially in the 19th century. It's a plantation system where elites in the Zanzibar stone town dominate the landscape and dominate production and have a kind of system that funnels wealth from production in rural areas into the urban center. So what this means is that the specific conditions of that political system produce a ranked size graph that looks more like something you'd expect to see in a system of sort of autonomous villages. In fact, it's not the case, it's actually more the case that political elites basically keeping people tied to the land. So the urban center is not so much a place where population flows, people come to because they are attracted by opportunities in urban areas. But rather the urban center functions more like, I argue, like a gated community basically. Stone town is smaller than you'd expect for a normative urban landscape. And the elites in stone town have used power to keep people tied to the land, these plantation systems first as enslaved people, and then later in the development of this kind of tenant-based squatter system. So what does this mean in terms of social transformation? What I argue is that the specific contours of state power in Zanzibar during this time explain some of the political events of the late 19th century. So one is the ease with which the British are able to seize state power in 1890. Zanzibar is an unintegrated state that is basically focused around the exploitation of agricultural resources, meaning that the landscape and the people living in it were not integrated in a project of state development or state formation, meaning that for the British, it was very easy to simply depose the ruler at the head of this landscape and take control in that way. Anti-colonial resistance, of course, happened across East African coasts and in Zanzibar, for example, the Abushiri were both, but it happened through a series of non-state actors basically. The state itself was quite weak. There were all these other heterarchical elements in places like the sort of villages and towns of Zanzibar, as well as on the mainland, which organized resistance in different ways, not at the level of the state. So I think my spatial analysis of settlement integration within the plantation system reflects the particular contours of how the state formed in Zanzibar in the 19th century and then how it responded to colonial intrusions. So lastly, I wanna talk about the different environmental contexts of Zanzibar and how they mediated Swahili social development and the development of the co-authentication system. I analyzed this through a method called Zonal Statistical Analysis using datasets of different environmental contexts across the island and comparing settlement to these different zones in a statistical way. And so these are the kind of zones that I analyzed settlement across for both my archeological sites as well as for settlement. It's a lot, I'm gonna skip through kind of some things. So what I initially sort of found here is that based on site locations, I could create aggregated suitability models for site locations for all periods. What I found is that the pre-colonial village, inland village sites favored the same environmental zones as late colonial sites. Since late colonial sites developed during this period of this clove mania period and reflective preference for environment suitable for agricultural production, I'm arguing it's not a stretch to suggest that pre-colonial inland village residents shared this preference too. These are some of the zones that I analyzed that used to create these sort of aggregates for site suitability. So these darker areas, you reflect the conditions that I observed for site locations for both the pre-colonial and the late colonial periods. And then I just wanted to note that this model of site suitability for my archeological sites maps really well onto the actually known settlement system recorded in the 1907 map. You can see especially down here, like just the way that known settlements really follow the areas of high probability for site prediction, right? But what this suggests is that, and what this kind of shows is not even generated but there's a fragmented history of settlement in these favored agricultural zones in the West and Central regions. From about 1100 to 1400, there are these inland village sites that we recorded which follow the same trends as the plantation system which develops in the 19th century. So if we go back in time, right? In the late 1st millennium Swahili communities settled permanently in coastal areas of the island where there are these bountiful marine resources. And the question is why would people leave the coast to occupy inland areas permanently starting in the early 2nd millennium? It's likely not population pressure since settlements are small and dispersed in this period but since pre-colonial villages are found in the same environmental zones as sites of the late colonial plantation system, it's not too much of a leap to assume that agricultural products were also part of the equation. This is corroborated by the presence of millet bread oven fragments found at both these pre-colonial villages as well as the large point of these open bowls we found which are associated elsewhere with rice-based dishes. So these inland village communities may have been settled by farmers wishing to meet some kind of demand for grain crops driven by new Islamic cultural norms with the Western Indian Ocean. The presence of imported luxury ceramics at these sites attests to what inland villagers may have been able to acquire in exchange for their grain. These sites are abandoned along with the stone town in the 14th century and these favorable agricultural zones were not reoccupied again until the late colonial period when agricultural production became a focused social and economic life under the plantation system once again. So the emerging view is somewhat paradoxical. The most agriculturally fertile regions of the island were settled sporadically. The settlement history of the region is fragmented and associated with specific conditions of demand for socially or economically in-demand products. So then in the Eastern region, equally paradoxically settlement and land use in these agriculturally barren and sort of marginal Eastern regions is persistent and continuous from the early second millennium to the present. From the earliest period of inland occupation we find ceramic scatters in these cleared stony field plots which are farmed today using slash and burn methods with an agriculture. In this region, people have developed adaptations to deal with shallow soils and agricultural pests. So this method, which is called Kapiga-Makongro in Swahili, it's a method of cutting out coral bedrock landscapes to conserve soil. The seasonal thing that happens over a long term and I think it's incrementally sort of transformed these landscapes and the field plots into more productive places that conserve soil more effectively. There's also the construction of stone field walls for dealing with agricultural pests. And finally, there is well construction which I'll talk about in a moment. But so since the Eastern region was occupied continuously from the first period of occupation in the early second millennium to the present, why did this occur when the Western areas are more agriculturally fertile? Why bother with all this when Western areas are so much easier to farm? Why does the Eastern region have such a permanent history of settlement despite the relative marginality of the landscape there? And theorize that through all periods small Swahili communities favored the Eastern region for a few reasons unrelated to agricultural production. The first of these is proximity to reefs. So along the Eastern region there are reefs just directly offshore which are easily accessible to small scale fishers. You can go out with a canoe or you can go out by yourself and fish on the beach. You can also practice seaweed farming which occurs there today. Comparably in the West, reefs are further offshore. They require a larger degree of social coordination and larger fishing ships to access the fish there. But in the East, I could see that there would be a preference for settlement in this region simply because of the ability to access fish on a small scale or in a kind of opportunistic way. What we found in these swidden field plots that we found in ceramic scatters is we also found things like shell. There's no shell in the inland villages in the West and Central regions. It seems that agricultural production was probably the means of subsistence there. But in the East we find things like these kind of shell scatters in fields. And that corresponds with modern practices related to land use in this region. So the way that Sweden field plots were today, they're no longer so shifting because of large population numbers today, but farmers work the land. They often bring their families out and camp for a period in the planting season. And they'll do things that use specific types of material culture like aluminum cooking pots and water jugs and things like that to cook food while they're out there camping and farming the land. And so my theory is that the kind of ceramic scatters we see in these field plots from as early as the 11th century are produced by the same types of practices. People going out and camping on the landscape, farming and then going back to their settled communities later. Also, so wells, so these wells were things that were recorded in the late 19th century by on the map. There are also wells in the Eastern region where we look and we come across it in the landscape. This is another adaptation, you could say, of a native settlement in this region. So the second factor that might have been a cause for this long-term persistent settlement in the Eastern region is the seclusion and kind of a security of the rocky, stony landscape. So this is the site of Kandui here. And this is the site of Kwanium-Changani. Kwanium-Changani is a pre-colonial Swahili village occupied up until about the 15th century. After the 15th century, it appears to have been abandoned. Kandui, meanwhile, is inland from the site on this rocky, stony plateau, which you can see a view of here. And Kandui was founded about the 15th century, the late 15th century, the early 16th century, and then persists into the 19th century. And so the best that I can theorize is that there might be some spatial reason why Kandui was founded pretty much the same time Kwanium-Changani was abandoned. And this period corresponds to this period of Portuguese incursion. So the Portuguese, we know, sailed up and down the east coast of the island. And it may have been the case that residents relocated from coastal areas to Kandui because of how secluded it is. This is a viewshed model showing how the plateau really makes settlement behind it much less visible from the coast. So it would have been a sort of defensive and secluded environment, a kind of naturally fortified area that residents in this turbulent period of Portuguese colonialism may have occupied after abandoning the coastal site of Kwanium-Changani, while still having access to these new shore reefs, not that far, it's only a few kilometers. Here's a picture of our survey team. This is the single kind of stony path up to the top of the plateau where the site is located. You can see the possible defensive or fortified possibility to this site. So these two reasons, access to reefs and seclusion and kind of fortification, I argue are some of the reasons why settlement is so much more persistent in the Eastern regions, despite its agricultural marginality. In contrast, the Western regions experience settlement growth of these kind of fits and starts in this fragmented pattern related to demand for specific agricultural products. Yeah, so that's it. The settlement, the project reconstructed inland settlements and we theorize some things relating to social transformations across different periods in the pre-colonial era and I'd like to thank my team, my advisors, everyone here at the ARF. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you from June for hosting me here. Yeah, that's it. I'll open it for questions. I'll just go off the edge, because I'm going to start. Otherwise, I'm going to be dead. Okay. All right. What's next? Next is, depending on grants I get and things like that, I've applied for a postdoc, actually. Next is a plan to, I think, shift focus more to the urban environment, the Santa Barbara. So reconstructing rural inland landscapes, it gives some insights into the formation of the urban center, but what I would like to research more now is something like the development of the urban center itself at Stone Town from the beginning of the early colonial period into the present. I'm looking at how these rural settlement dynamics related to the development of that urban center. That's what I could see as a future project. I don't know, do you know, Christine, if you both have questions? I have things going real quick, so I'm going to jump in and have a little talk about it here. I don't want to talk to you, too. Ah! That would be great. So, awesome. A lot of work, so a lot of time, you know. One of the things I really want to thank you and shout out for is the 100th World War, because there's still a lot of community projects so far away. We've got potentially a couple of things that I do for them. So I just wanted you to give me all the videos, you know, kind of look at it, after that, see if you can talk to me. I don't think it's this good, but it's huge, I don't want to say that. And then, you know, the interest in, for me, is also that connection to the ceramics and some kind of, right? So the ceramics are that kind of daily, the co-optidian toolkit for people cooking what you need every day. And so you have them and you're looking at these transformations and I know you a lot of them have the clay sources and things like that, but you get like, you know, you start to work with temporary, you start to work with the kind of things that are in the heating regime and things like that. And what I would ask is, you know, you made that connection between changing culinary tradition and the way people were being organized and the way that maybe people being forced, you know, forced to do labor versus those, how are you there? And I start to feel like we're inside of those that were already there when you talk about those with the forced, do you think? What do you think the relationship is between where those folks were and how they live and the things in the conservative food tradition? What was the kind of, can you keep it apart a little bit wider? How are those things reflected by the ceramics? You know? Sure, yeah. Right, two different groups you're talking about. There's enslaved mainland East Africans who were brought there to labor in the clover plantation system. There's also the indigenous Wahili people, right? So around the mid 19th century, historical sources suggest that these two groups were about equal in size. So this is a tremendous demographic transformation. Differentiating between these groups using ceramic evidence alone is difficult. It's certainly the case that this this averted, care-nated cooking platform develops in terms of our prior to the clover plantation system. So there's archaeologists or a croucher who's shown that this is probably continuous as a form from about the 16th century to really into the 20th century. And it's a derived form from earlier, what's called like late Tana tradition, Tiw ceramics that are part of the Swahili ceramic tradition on the coast. So the fact that it becomes so common in widespread. So I guess I would argue that like the ceramic form is something that develops on the island internally prior to these groups. Then I think the changes in the, the temper and the color may relate to the transformations as a result of enslaved people being brought to the island. The imported ceramics may also suggest something. So it's definitely the case that there are far more imported ceramics in the western and central areas in the plantation zones than in the east where I think historically indigenous Swahili people are attested to have lived for a long time. So there's all these kinds of 20th century historical sort of propaganda descriptions from in the time of politics in Zanzibar that are these sort of racial characterizations of Arabs in the west and then Swahili people in the east. And it's like these people will always live there. And so that's not necessarily the case at all, but it definitely reflects the exclusion of Swahili people from the wealth of the plantation system. I think the fact that there's far fewer imported ceramics in the 19th century in the east may reflect that kind of exclusion. But yeah, in the west between like plantation owners and then enslaved people, it's very difficult to distinguish who's using what. And Sarah Proucher argues that there was a lot of kind of that there really wasn't a distinction in like who use what there was a lot of reciprocity and gift giving and sharing within the kind of patron-client relationships of enslaved people and the plantation owners that resulted in these artifacts being all over the landscape at every type of site from field houses to big plantation estates. I don't know if that really answers your question, but something I'm thinking about. Yeah, and we'll pursue more. Thank you, yeah. Christine. I just wanted to ask you about on the situation that we've been talking about that it comes in at kind of a certain time in terms of dominant, I guess, reduced crop, but also some of the consumer crops linked to that pottery. This is a change in not only crop production, food crop production, not both, putting that on food crop production for the residents, but also preparation to take. So I wanted to ask if it was all that our food is workplace? Like if it's about your knowledge, in terms of putting the plant in the soil, but for people who are living there, do you think it's a place something or is it a path that would be because of what you were suggesting because it's kind of a razzled up rapid flash political situation? Yeah, historical sources definitely suggest that cassava was the food of enslaved people in Zanzibar. It comes in 1799 and it becomes this staple crop that really it's like behind the cloak is the cassava. It's like the thing that allows enslaved people to, it's very cheap. Yeah. It's productive, low energy. Yeah, and so still today on the coast, there's anthropological research on the coast describing how cassava is still today associated with poverty, with instability, with like, yeah, basically being this cheap food. It does nothing else than we do. Pretty much, yeah. So the relationship between cassava and these averted cooking pots, I can't be sure of, it's a theory basically that you see the change happen at the same time, that these cooking pots become predominant at the same time. So what was the main diet before cassava? Before cassava. So I think it's rice, mostly in the Western areas that you can grow rice. But also in these Eastern regions, right? Cassava is what, some plants, things being grown before that in these sweet, sweetened field plots. You can't grow rice in Eastern regions because it's so stony. It's not actually the African rice. It's, or is it Sativa Asian rice? Yeah, it comes from Madagascar. Yeah, it comes from Madagascar, I think is the theory. But so the question is like, what will people growing in these sweetened field plots in the East before they have cassava? And there's other crops there too today. There's taro, there's, I know the Swahili names, but I'm thinking of what the names are in English. Taro, another root, is it arrow root maybe? Is that cassava? That's it, rest of it is American. Yeah. All of that and your whole American. Right, so there's taro, there's sweet potato and there's, I think arrow root is the other one. But so these are other crops grown today. So it could be that these crops were brought earlier in the past because rice comes through this Austronesian length from Madagascar. It's possible you also have, or I don't know, they want the one is a purple yam, I think. That one? There's a yam that's from Southeast Asia. I think that's what it's called after we look it up. There's a Southeast Asia, yeah, taro as well coming from Southeast Asia. And so that's a theory. There's a 12th century Arabic historical source that refers to Swahili people on the coast eating millet, bananas, and it says a tube called Kalari, a tuber called Kalari. So it's like, who knows what that means, but there was some tuber on the coast in the 12th century. So yeah, it could be that these. So it sounds more like a dish than other places. I did, so that would be the thing you find out, but it doesn't really matter how it's done. Yeah. There's other crops you see in the warm-up, or just some really, if you know, two-pollard, then it's like a mandalow report. Yeah, absolutely. Because you see the replacement. Absolutely, yeah. Of sort of staple crops that really changes the stability of the island. Yeah, certainly. Yeah, there's, so this, so archeobotanical research on this would be really interesting. And there really is none after the pre-colonial period. So it's like all speculation based on. Yeah. Yeah. So it's definitely also the historical description of clove mania where people are ripping out every other clove, or crop to plant clove suggests that probably things like rice and other types of subsistence production were kind of pushed aside for cloves, which is why censor becomes an importer of food in the 19th century. But yeah. Yeah, so certainly definitely these things are happening in these transformations, yeah. Thank you. The clove ripping and crop. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For me, the central, your range-sized study. Yeah. Has that, have people done that with other education environment? Is it central place here, based on, a lot of that comes from, from Northern Water, Europe, and Fred, the southern part of Europe? Yeah, for sure, yeah. Right, so the kind of normative assumptions of that, that the theories of that rank size are based on come from, yeah, like a European kind of town, urban landscape environment. Yeah, it's gonna have to look into whether, yeah, comparing a rank size and analysis with other plantations this would be very interesting. Because I think it's the results of that graph really specifically showed something about the plantation landscape, which is not a normative urban environment, not a normative rural environment. And I think the graph really reflects something particular about how plantation leads like kept people in the land while still amassing lots and lots of wealth. Comparable wealth to like an urban center elsewhere, but without the population flows into that urban center. Yeah, right, very extractive. Certainly. And I think contributing to the specific way the state became organized in 19th century Zanzibar. We're gonna walk a fine pace to study the ground. Sure, yeah. Yeah, I wonder how, yeah, rank size has been applied like that. Yeah, yeah, okay. Are there questions in the Zoom to look at now? I don't know. Okay, there's, well, Maria Young asked, where'd you get that great map? I got it through cruising archival sources, basically, just kind of by happenstance. That's the answer, yeah. Any other questions on Zoom, I guess not? Thank you. Okay, thanks so much.