 First, before we begin today's talk, I'd like to recognize that Berkeley sits on the territory of Huchin, the ancestral and unceded land of the Chuchenyo Ohlone, the successors of the historic and sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County. This land was and continues to be of great importance to the Ohlone people. We recognize that every member of the Berkeley community has and continues to benefit from the use and occupation of this land. By offering this land acknowledgement, we affirm Indigenous sovereignty and will work to hold University of California Berkeley more accountable to the needs of American Indians and Indigenous peoples. Before we begin today's talk and before I introduce our speaker, I would like to announce that next week we will be hearing from Dr. Pat Kirch and Dr. Jillian Swift who will be speaking on archaeological investigations of long-term sustainability in the Hawaiian Islands. So please join us next week at the same time for their very interesting talk. If anyone from the ARF community has any other announcements, please feel free to put them in the YouTube chat and I will announce them following Wolfgang's talk. So our speaker today is Wolfgang Alders who is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. He's also a friend of mine, so that's very fun. I'm very excited to hear from him myself. His work focuses on archaeology and landscape history in Zanzibar, Tanzania, located on the East African coast. And today he will be talking to us about long-term inland settlement and agricultural change in Zanzibar. So thank you, Wolfgang. Thanks very much, Lucy, for the introduction. I'm going to start sharing my screen here. Let's see. I will share PowerPoint. So yeah, my name is Wolfgang Alders. I'm a seventh year in the archaeology program at UC Berkeley, and I'm going to talk today about some of the results of my field work from 2019, looking at settlement patterns and doing systematic survey in Zanzibar, Tanzania. So as a brief outline, I'm going to talk first about Zanzibar in East Africa, then I'm going to talk about the survey, including the aims, regions, and methods. I'm going to discuss the survey results, including the discussion of key sites. Then I'm going to talk about environment, land use, and social reorganization in Zanzibar over this long-term period. And I'll also discuss community archaeology, meetings, Swahili translation, geoarchaeology, and conclusions and acknowledgments. So to start out, this is a map from Tumfit and made recently. It shows all of the early sites on the East African coast at, oops, sorry, which roughly, and this area is roughly known as the Swahili coast. It extends down from Somalia into Tanzania, Mozambique, and Madagascar. So in all these sites, which roughly begin to be occupied around the sixth century at the earliest, there are common food ways that suggest modes of agricultural production, which may have been occurring. The thing is, a lot of these early sites, especially like in Zanzibar, are sites that are found pretty much directly in coastal areas, even on beaches. That's kind of the settlement pattern for a lot of these earlier sites. There's two specific sites from Zanzibar are Ngujiaku and Fukuchani, which are found pretty much directly on the beaches of these places. Nevertheless, the kind of shared food ways among all these sites on the East African coast suggest types of agricultural production happening in land. So after this period, there is a diversification of site types across the East African coast. You get urbanization and the development of towns that occurs on Zanzibar and other places as well. Some sites develop stone architecture, while others remain other types of village forms involved in marine resource exploitation and smaller scale communities. So Shangani here is the site that develops into the modern town of Zanzibar, which is the largest town in Zanzibar. Tumbatu was occupied for a shorter period and Kizmkazi is also a modern town. So these three sites develop stone architecture and urban forms in this period. Here's an example of some of the architecture at Tumbatu. These sites all, and sites in the East African coast that are similar to them, all sort of experienced what has been argued a shift towards communal consumption involving rice. So there's a shift to more open form bowls imported and locally made that were probably involved in rice consumption. This is what Jeffrey Fleischer argues. Sarah Walsh also argues that you can see through paleoethnobotanical evidence, you can see a transition from millet to rice at sites in Pemba. And it's possible that these kind of inset bowls from this period in the architecture specifically references the types of communal consumption happening involved in rice. So another example from this is a passage from Ivan Batuta's 1331 visit to Mogadishu, where he describes being received and being treated to a dinner with rice and curries and things like that. And it's kind of a specific deal that happens in this period. So while the spatiality of urban sites remained decidedly coastal from this period, the shift to communal feasting with rice-based dishes probably does imply some kind of reorganization of agricultural labor and settlement in rural areas. Definitely in the colonial period, this appears to be the case. So the Portuguese arrive around the beginning of the 16th century, and they are very interested in taxing economic activities in East Africa and supplying their ships. So they describe agricultural production in great detail in Zanzibar. They also built these two sites, which are described as fortified farms in northern Zanzibar, which I'll discuss later that probably have something to do with the agricultural economy. So these are just quotes from different Portuguese sources describing agricultural production. By the 18th century, the town of Shangani on the coast, which becomes Zanzibar's stone town, became quite wealthy and was quite a busy hub for trade in the mid-19th, 18th century. The 18th century was a period of economic reorganization all over the world, as mercantile economies boomed and private merchants developed a degree of independent political power. So an author named Fahad Basharra makes an argument that this happened in the Indian Ocean as well, in the western Indian Ocean specifically, then starting in the late 18th and early 19th century. There was a movement in Islamic jurisprudence, which permitted novel interpretations of property, interest, and debt, which facilitated the commodification of land and produce in Zanzibar in a way that was not previously possible. So through a novel interpretation of a form of land sale called the Hiar, or option sale, Omani planters and landowners were able to borrow capital for caravans against the lands they already held and reinvest their gains from the ivory and slave trade into expansive date plantations in Oman and clove plantations in Zanzibar. Capital from caravan venturing on the East African mainland was reinvested into clove and coconut trees. So while owning and tending orchards had always been part of the aristocratic activities of Swahili and Omani elites, for the first time trees came to have an exact economic value and constituted a metric against which capital could be loaned. As capital flowed from India to Zanzibar and clove and cobra flowed from Zanzibar to global markets, the fields of Zanzibar landowners were transformed from farms effectively into plantations as the argument goes. So in relation to this, of course, slavery was the dominant mode of production with slaves brought from mainland East Africa up until the late 19th century and this is the memorial to slavery in Zanzibar where slaves were brought. So by the mid 19th century, the largely Omani landowning class in Zanzibar controlled most of the fertile land on the island and had largely switched from financing caravans to using slave labor for the production of cloves and cobra. This enabled them to grow extremely wealthy and this massive economic boom shifted the political landscape of Zanzibar and indeed the entire East African coast and has had massive ramifications in the post-colonial period. So the archaeology of this period, of this later period is quite new. The main study of the plantation system in Zanzibar is from Sarah Croucher's project in 2006. She used judgmental surveys around Mahanda and Dunga in Zanzibar as well as on Pemba and she excavated the site of Mgoli, which is a plantation site in Pemba. And so her work has been quite helpful for me for understanding the spatial layout of plantations as well as the ceramic assemblages that I was encountering in the field. Other recent investigations include research on the Portuguese settlements at Fukuchani and Valenie, these supposedly fortified farms in the north of Zanzibar by Neil Norman and Adriela Violet. And this has investigated the impact of activities and activities of the Portuguese in rural areas and their impact on local rural settlement. So the main questions for my survey relate to the long-term settlement patterns on the island. I'm interested in the general form of settlement. I'm interested in the relationship between rural inland areas and those coastal towns I mentioned of pre-colonial periods at Shungani, Tumbatu, and Kizmkazi. And I'm interested in when agricultural production intensified in the clove and copra plantations, did landowners develop their plantations on top of earlier unrecorded Swahili settlements and how did the earlier landscape and the modifications of the landscape shape the 19th century transformations. And finally, I'm interested in how settlement and land use varied across environmental environments and how do these environments relate to the social transformations of the 19th century. So for this, my main method was systematic survey. And this was necessary for characterizing the archaeological landscape because I wanted to find all sorts of site types from all periods. I didn't just want to find specific sites, but I also used some forms of judgmental survey for investigating specific areas. So it was a sort of combination of both. This is the map of my survey areas. The three large areas are the ones where I'm attempting to be systematic. This one here investigates Sarah Croucher's survey area. This one here and these other two here are survey transects that we planned in collaboration with communities from community meetings we had. So sort of a blend of both. Here you can see squares that were intentionally stratified in a staggered pattern in order to capture a band across the island. And then transects were placed within these squares randomly using a random number generator from 1 to 10. We held meetings in every major town where we based ourselves for our research. We explained our goals and took input and feedback from community members and planned our surveys with advanced notice to residents while also being careful to avoid trespassing in certain areas and to avoid digging their graves. In certain areas we chose to relocate our transects at the request of community members. Here's an example of an artifact shown to us by a community member. So all the archaeological materials we collected from shovel test pits were collected and bagged. We had three teams digging across our transects. We would sieve with one centimeter mesh. We would record soil colors, depth of deposits, soil types, artifacts found, photos taken, bagged catalog numbers, and then we would immediately backfill the shovel test pit. While walking from one line of shovel test pits to the next we would spread out and scan for any surface remains, which we recorded either as fine spots or artifact scatters. So the dots in the transect here mostly represent shovel test pits across one kilometer transects spaced apart in rows. We completed 21 transects and dug 935 shovel test pits, including those which we used to define site boundaries. So to define a site boundary we used a system where we would sample in cardinal directions. When we would find archaeological materials we would dig northwest, east and south until we would find negative shovel test pits or two negative shovel test pits. And you can see down here this is where we defined an artifact scatter and we also tried to test the subsurface boundaries in other directions. So the purpose for this was not just to locate sites but also to be able to determine site size. The reason for trying to survey in a band across the entire island was to be able to compare settlement patterns through time over a diverse set of environmental contexts. So they which tend to vary more east to west and they do north to south so this is a geology map. And you can see there's a diversity of geological features that go kind of east to west which we were able to capture with the survey regions which are highlighted here. In addition, rainfall, this is one of the more diverse areas for rainfall in Zanzibar and we were able to capture rainfall gradient across the differences. And land use as well as a diverse area for land use so you have sugarcane, rice, mixed gardens and tree plots, as well as this area where shifting cultivation is practiced in brush and exposed coral bedrock. Finally, we also have hydrology maps of the survey area at different scales of resolution. And additionally, we have an estimation of the plantation system. This was difficult for because while these estimations are generally accurate, I think one problem is that clove plantation boundaries were never actually mapped on paper when they existed, but they were rather understood in terms of ownership over orchards and trees. But we tried to capture areas both inside and outside of the plantation areas. We also have this 1915 British colonial map, which was a map of settlements and roads which was helpful as well for comparing to our survey data. And then a final source for remote sensing data is drone imagery that we acquired through the Zanzibar mapping project and the revolutionary government of Zanzibar Commission for Lands, which is a open source set of data of drones that were flown over the entire island and really nice high resolution imagery up to a seven centimeter resolution in some cases. So that's been quite helpful as well. Systematic survey was just one part of the research. We also use judgmental surveys. So as I mentioned, Sarah Croucher survey region with the green dots representing sites and site components should identified on the basis of community participation and surface detection. So we wanted to do subsurface tests in the same area and see what kind of subsurface finds we would get around that area of no 19th century occupation. The other areas up here in the north at Panium Changani. This was at the behest of the community there who had pointed out a site which was right near their schoolhouse which had a purportedly Portuguese well as well as a large shell mound. And then the site here in Catalani, which is a site pointed out to us again by community partners around the Honda who described the site as a place where enslaved people were held in the 19th century. So we did a transit there as well. So some of the first conclusions of the survey are related to subsurface testing patterns. So in many parts of East Africa of East African coast and especially in Pemba. The 19th century remains are found on the surface. Well earlier remains are found below the deep sandy soils. And so this is a picture from the site of Chuaqa in Pemba. And you can see here it's sort of a hill slope and the site is above this hill slope. Here you can see this kind of dark anthropogenic layer, which is about maybe about 50 centimeters down, which is run off from the anthropogenic layers of the site. If you look even further down you can see there are these striations that are all throughout this entire cut here and they represent I think seasonal wash of sediments down this hillside. So it's a very deep, very soft sandy context and a lot of Pemba is like this and a lot of East African coast is like this. So we wanted to test if that was the same thing in Zanzibar where you would have to dig deep down to find these earlier deposits. In the east of Zanzibar, this is definitely not the case and we weren't able to dig at all and that's because you have this coral limestone bedrock pretty much everywhere. So we were not going to deal with the same things there. In the west you have something that looks similar to that cut but in fact is quite different. It's actually not formed by alluvial sedimentation over seasons. This is in fact just a very large, massive sandy clay model which is very hard and compact and we're pretty sure from our survey results fairly archaeologically sterile. So at the very top here you can see this thin layer of darker anthropogenic soils but the majority of this whole thing is just extremely hard and compact and pretty much like a concrete in a lot of ways. And so as a result a lot of our shovel test bits looked like this. They had a thin anthropogenic layer at the top and then the rest of it was this hard compact, lateritic sandy clay which out of all of our shovel test bits did not contain any archaeological materials. So if we were finding materials they were in that top layer meaning they were quite close to the surface. The other thing to note is that the average depth of these shovel of the top layers where we're finding materials is about the same as the length of an agricultural hoe. So when we're doing survey in agricultural areas we're finding materials in the subsurface that we're also finding on the surface probably because at some point they were hod up in the past. And so what this means I think is that we can draw a conclusion from the survey is that surface survey would probably have been sufficient but I think we couldn't really determine that without doing tests like this in the first place. And we did indeed find subsurface materials which were very important. In some cases we did have places with deeper deposits in which case we made these specialized shovels that are about like a meter and 30 that enable us to dig deeper. But most of the time we didn't use them at that depth. So here is the total list of sites and this is a little difficult to take in all at once but you can see we have site sizes mapped in hectares. Dates are based on the ceramic types found at the site which is a pretty secure way of dating things on the East African coast it's based on specific kilns in places like in the Middle East and East Asia. It's also based on radiocarbon dates from other sites with similar material. So I'm fairly confident in these dates. The areas of course is determined by our method of testing in the subsurface and also mapping the boundaries of scatters. And we use subjective terms to categorize these, these site sizes, which are based on other work. So this is maybe an easier way to visualize the site results. On the left are the earlier period sites and on the right are the later period sites. I think we'll just start going through some of the site examples. We can start with the earlier period. I guess what you notice is that there's a, there's a suspicious lack of things in the Western region and that's what I'll talk about a bit later. But let's start with the earliest period. We're going to talk about the site of Moin Bedambo first, which is up in the East. It was in this transect or in this region planned on the basis of community collaboration. It is a site in the rocky coral limestone bedrock area. This green line here represents a stone wall that we mapped in the site. And we think this site is quite early, at least in at least one phase of it is because we were finding these ceramics that match the early Tana tradition ceramics, which date to around the 7th to 10th centuries. So it's one of the earliest sites we found. This piece here looks very much like a Dimbeni wear shirt, which is a shirt type produced in the Camaros, which is far south and is pretty rare in other sites in East Africa. So it's possible there's some connection there with that type of wear. And here again is the stone wall, which is a dry stone wall probably added later, probably related to these later ceramics here, which are 19th century ceramics. So we think the site was reoccupied later. The next site and next two sites are both these larger sites. These are some of the largest sites we recorded. Moin Acombo is on a stream. It's in an agricultural field. It's in the kind of Western region here near Mahanda. Kirikacha also is in the very central region. Also by a stream, you can kind of tell from the vegetation there. Also an agricultural area, some of the deepest deposits that we were encountering. Lots of this specific imported ceramic, which is called late Scrafiata, which roughly has a date from 1100 to 1300. These are all open bowl forms. So they relate probably to some kind of communal consumption like I was discussing from this period. As well as lots of local diagnostic ceramics with decorations that are also indicative of roughly that time period. So one thing we also found at both of these sites are were sherds or fragments of a mofa oven, which is a, which is a type of bread oven that was an almost whole version was found at the site of Bandari Ku by Jeffrey Fleischer in Pemba. So this implies some kind of larger scale cooking of bread, probably millet bread, I think is the theory. The site of Panium Changani is up in the northern region there. It's the Shalman site I was discussing. It's a coastal site. It has the Portuguese well or so it's called. It's relatively large and it dates probably to the 14th or 15th century based on the green glaze, green glazed monochrome and the Celadon, as well as this piece of what is called Hussuni modeled where which is a type of ceramic found only on the southern Tanzanian coast at the site of Kilwa. Kandui is another site in the east. It's found in a patch of good soil which is surrounded by lots of coral limestone bedrock so it indicates something about settlement patterns there. It is likely also 14th to 15th century based on these Islamic green glazed monochromes, but it has later occupations as well on the basis of Chinese blue and light porcelain and industrial whiteware ceramics, and there's also a spindle Whirl from the site. There's lots of other locally produced course earthenware for all these sites that have not included just for space and time. The thing we found is that in some areas around these sites or in the landscape we would find just single finds or a few different shards of pieces that look like this this kind of 11th to 14th century we think neck punctating where which possibly indicates some kind of temporary or seasonal occupation in certain places. It's a phenomenon I'm going to try to explain throughout this presentation especially in the later period of these very small little occurrences of archaeological materials in agricultural landscapes which I think has something to do with types of agricultural work. So let's move on to the later period now. You can see the map is much more complicated there's a lot more material. Western region is occupied with a much greater density than it was in the earlier periods and if I didn't mention the size of the dots correlates roughly proportionally to the size of the sites the smaller the dot smaller the site and the larger sites are the ones with the largest dots. The lighter green represents 16th to 18th century materials and the darker green represents 19th century materials the gray represents indeterminate materials that are likely 19th century they just don't have the imports needed to like clearly make that determination. So, the first site to talk about is one a combo again it's the same site as the earlier village site but it has down in the Southwest here, a 19th century occupation. And in fact it has a large stone house, which we recorded. This is a house made out of coral limestone. We met with the owners of the land who are descendants of the family which built this house probably in the early to mid 20th century. We were enthusiastic about our research and we're very interested in interested in helping us discuss and plan our discussions of the history of the site. So the site itself was a sugar plantation. This here is the foundation of a waterwheel that we cleared away. And down here are the remains of a stone bridge so this site is in an area very near to Sarah Crouchers 19th century investigations around it's an area with rich 19th century materials and sites and it was likely part of the plantation economy but probably a little bit later because they were doing sugar plantations rather than clothes. I think there were clothes but it wasn't the dominant crop there. Some of the materials are kind of late 19th century early 20th century you have these hand painted white earthenwares. There are also these red Indian earthenwares which date roughly to the 19th century as well as glass. In general the 19th century and the later periods, the materials look something like this you have these coarse earthenware cooking pots and vessels with arched motifs on the on the shoulder, and then you have a lot of industrially produced earthenware white earthenwares, transfer prints, hand painted kind of floral decorations which are kind of, they're also termed masterware Chinese blue and white porcelain, some sponge decorated and some slipped annual or dipped annual So these are the kind of ceramics we find often at a lot of these 19th century sites. Mkatzeleni is this site that was shown to us by the same family that on the land at Monacombo. They said it was a site where enslaved people were kept in the 19th century. So the site itself is this very large stone house that is quite peculiar it's much larger than most other houses on Zanzibar. It's in this very secluded isolated area away from any roads away from any sources of water. We were not, we didn't go into the site we didn't know the landowner so we just passed by. We did do a survey around the house and we found some archaeological materials on the surface. We, we did document this one shirt here which is a roulette aware, which is interesting because, unlike in most other places in Zanzibar in fact I don't believe there's any examples of this in Zanzibar. So roulette wares are quite common around the Great Lakes region in mainland East Africa so it seems to indicate there is probably some connection there to people brought from mainland East Africa in the course of slavery. The next site I'll talk about is Chani in Vingeni. It is a site that sort of defeated our survey methodology and that it's so massive it really took too long to try to hopefully delineate the boundaries of the site it's, it's found within the modern town of Chani. So it's, it's probably a set that developed in the 18th and 19th centuries into the modern town. There were lots of examples of very nice Chinese blue and white porcelain, as well as this shell edge I believe, or is it feather edge shirt here as well as some other shirts that I'm not quite sure yet what they are but if anyone knows they can tell me. It's overlooking a rice field as well as to the, to the east here there's this large rice field. Kiberikani is another 18th and 19th century site, lots of Chinese blue and white porcelain. This architectural feature here is one where there are, there's this vaulted interior space with plaster. It kind of looks like a wood fire pizza oven but I don't think that's what it actually is. Most people who lived on the site, or the people we talked to didn't know what it was. So it's sort of beyond the memory of, of living inhabitants around the area. It's possibly related to plantation economies though. The other type of site that we mostly encountered where these smaller sites outside of these larger areas where we would just find small artifact scatters, and often we would find these things that were described as Indian water jugs or produce produce an India red, red earthenware for holding up. This is a very interesting piece we found in the middle of a rice field by in a kind of field house context. It's a, it's a gray beard whiskey jug, I think dating to the 1930s you can, there's examples of them on the internet you can find. But mostly we're finding things like this these kind of earthenware shirts and so we think this relates to some kind of settlement pattern where you have small sites or site components possibly representing small holder hamlets or field houses. There's also areas like areas of temporal temporary seasonal occupation related to agricultural production. So sites of the size are documented in other surveys, but no other survey reports, such a large number in an area comparable to the survey region with such a wide and even distribution. The spread of these small occupation areas suggest some kind of reorganization in the domestic economy of rural sansa bar so well relatively isolated village sites seem to develop into the larger sites of the 19th century. So an expansion of settlement probably related to agricultural labor and probably related to to the mass importation of enslaved East Africans for slave labor during this time. So what kind of long term also here's another example of these are more things found in these smaller sites, these kind of cooking muscles. And also these sort of examples we would find out on the survey in in field plots in in farming plots of modern pots being used and left for cooking out in the field while someone is doing kind of temporary occupation of an area for agricultural labor. So what kind of long term patterns can we discuss here. These are between rural inland areas and the coastal towns of the pre colonial period so in the early period. For one, the site of when by Nambo is one of the few if only really early sites found in this rocky coral bedrock area, which is an unusual location for sites of this period which are usually found on the coast. So this suggests interesting things about the age of certain kinds of land use in these areas. The village sites at Kirikacha and one a combo are the perfect examples of the site type I was expecting to find kind of which is these village sites that are based in rich agricultural soils around streams, and probably engaged in the agriculture and communal consumption of grain, and we're likely part of a note or we're likely form nodes within a broader settlement pattern that included those more well known early second millennium sites on the coast like Shangani or Timbatu. The agricultural production intensified in the 19th century, did these later sites develop on top of earlier sites and how does this wheelie landscape modifications and settlement forms shape 19th century landscape transformations. So in the East, the settlement forms and distribution of sites grows slightly but generally follows a similar pattern consistent with the idea of shifting cultivation and permanent settlement in areas of good soil. The apparent settlement stability in this region should be compared against an oral history of the eastern region as a reserve of itinerant labor for clove plantations, especially in the post slavery period, as well as a place where people dispossessed from the more agriculturally fertile lands in the West were supposed to have settled in the 19th century. I think in this case, any discussion of resilience or sustainability should be framed in this context where political exclusion and dispossession were the most salient political forces operating in Zanzibar during this period of clove intensification. So in the West, the largest areas of occupation in the 19th century around Mahonda and Chinese Invengenie did indeed develop out of or near early village sites. So these large sites here, Chinese Invengenie and then Monacombo around Mahonda, they all they both developed almost directly on top of these earlier village sites at Monacombo and Kirikacha here. But additionally, there was a dramatic expansion of sites, especially very small ones in almost every area surveyed which likely reflects the intensification of agricultural production, especially in the western area. So, did settlement vary across different environments and how do these environments relate to social and political changes to answer this question I want to discuss a little bit more about the contrasting land use practices across the island. Especially in the western region, short of phytolith or paleo botanical analysis, historical land use can be inferred basically through patterns of settlement. The expansion of small sites that likely indicate field houses or hamlets and rural areas are likely related to mixed gardens, subsistence farming, and larger scale economic production, possibly involving enslaved people or tenants of the post slavery colonial period. In the eastern this is sort of an example of a modern example of what I mean by field house it's kind of a place where you can process great you can process rice you can do threshing and winnowing at these sites. You can also just take shelter from the rain, people come out and sleep in these places temporarily during harvest seasons. This is a kind of example of a cassava field here as well. In the eastern regions though, a specific form of landscape modification is present, which site service suggests has a deep history in the region which has more physical evidence. So farming in limestone bedrock involves a form of incremental landscape change where special tools are used to cut holes and stone in order to preserve and better develop soils. Agriculture in the eastern region is limited by good soils, but the extent of good soil is constantly being altered and preserved through these techniques in a context of shifting cultivation. So I was able to go and observe people doing this specific practice where they're cutting out pieces of coral stone in these fields with these long iron spike called in time bow. And for the purpose of planting and burying soil and conserving soil in places where soil is quite thin and sparse. Stonewall construction, which similarly might be a form of incremental landscape change is also common in these areas or was common in fact, no one who I interviewed or talked to was alive during the living memory of when these things were constructed, but they're probably from the later period. Neil Norman and Adrian LeViolet have theorized based on their work at Fukuchani and Voleni that these were likely built following the arrival of the Portuguese in Sanzibar and the fact that the Portuguese would drop off pigs on the island which would destroy crops. So it seems like their creation is probably related to that phase of landscape change when you suddenly have lots of pigs ravaging everywhere. And that's what people would describe the walls as as means for keeping animals out of the fields. Pigs have been eradicated on Sanzibar now so it makes sense why no one is building these anymore. But it seems like if you're cutting out stone in order to make to preserve soil and to farm in the first place, the loose stone from that might have something to do with the way that you could construct these walls. It seems like there might be some kind of synergy between the practice of cutting stone out of the ground in order to plant crops and needing stone like this to make these drystone walls. So we can also compare different types of Arbora culture from east to west. So expansion and settlement in the western regions was likely related to clove cultivation, a labor intensive process involving enslaved workers that produced a commodified product for global markets. Similarly, plantations also process coconut trees for Capra and cultivated large orchards of other fruits sold to market and used for personal and communal consumption in Sanzibar. The market for clove depended on a dramatic economic boom which ultimately proved unsustainable as clove prices dropped. On the other hand, an important tree in the eastern region is the Baobab, which is not intentionally planted but which is maintained through incidental processes of harvesting and cultivation to the extent that in many areas it is the dominant feature on the landscape. Living for up to a thousand years in many parts of East Africa, Baobabs represent an extremely stable source of food and medicine, and we're also used in the past for fabric and soap making. While Baobab seeds are sold in markets, they have never represented this significant cash crop. However, they may have and still do help sustain communities in the eastern periods of political and economic hardship. So here's a more classic example. This is not from Sanzibar. It's hard to take pictures of Baobabs because they're so massive actually. This is examples of Baobabs from the drone imagery we have from the Sanzibar mapping initiative. So one project I'm working on now is trying to map the distribution of Baobabs across Sanzibar. And it seems like based on the very specific look of Baobab trees from the air compared to other trees, it would be possible to use some kind of automated detection program to be able to get a map of every single Baobab on the island and compare it to human settlement. Because Baobabs have a lot of relationships with human settlement, especially in other parts of East Africa. So what happened about two thirds of the way through my survey is that I was in a field with a bunch of smoke from people burning crops and I had a massive asthma attack and I had to leave the field early. So I did not get to finish a lot of things I wanted to. I was taking geoarchaeological samples. I did not get to take these out of the country and now they're basically stuck there as a result of COVID. So I don't have the geoarchaeological samples from site specific locations. I do have geoarchaeological samples from landscape forms in rice fields and in upland areas, which allow me to characterize the landscape more generally but I wanted to compare these to the site specific for morphology samples in order to get a sense of things like different types of land use, maneuvering, animal fodder, site formation processes, things like that, and activities at the site. That's kind of on hold for now. One thing I was able to do is a project on Swahili translation. So the other thing I was not able to do as a result of having to leave early is have final community meetings where I would present my results to the different communities that I worked in, show samples of artifacts and take input and feedback from different community members. But instead the thing I can work on remotely is this Swahili translation project. So one of the things we did in the evenings when we were doing ceramic analysis is we would try to go through and figure out Swahili words for all the different archeological terminologies that we were using. This has never been done before and Swahili basically doesn't operate as an archeological language. So one thing I've been working on with Jackson Kimambo who's a scholar in Tanzania is translating archeological reports into Swahili so that we can bring them to the communities. And that was the main request I had from community meetings was people saying that like, look, a lot of archeologists come here and they do research and we can't read any of the reports because they're not in Swahili and we'd like them to be in Swahili and like them to be available in our schools so that our students can also learn about the history of this region. So I'd say that's my main objective right now in terms of community engagement is this kind of translation project. So in conclusion, in terms of the site survey while early and mid second millennium settlement is based on village sites with craft production taking place, links to other Swahili towns and links to the western Indian Ocean. The expansion in the late second millennium suggests a dramatic reorganization of rural life. Instead of the isolated villages of the early second millennium by the 18th century numerous small hamlets and field houses were spread out across diverse micro environments in the rural areas. By the 19th century nearly all sites had evidence for mass produced European ceramic wares that were imported, as well as Chinese blue and light porcelain, as well as the development of several larger villages and towns around the sites of Mahanda and Chinese Jenny and this suggests probably rapid demographic and economic expansion. So that basically sums up my report here I'd like to thank all these different people who have helped me definitely couldn't have done this on my own, especially thank you to my field team. I'll leave why Zainab, Asya, Combo, Mikidadi, Hafiz, Neema and Hamadi. So thanks again everyone and thanks to my advisors and everyone who's my colleagues. Yeah, that's basically it. I guess I'll open for questions now. I'll turn my video back on and I can relay the question so please anyone who has questions for Wolfgang, please put them in the chat in YouTube and I can relay them. And as well as any announcements that anyone may have about the ARF, etc. But I'm going to start by asking a question of my own. So I was really interested in the translation thing. And you mentioned you were also working on like an oral history sort of project. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that and like the methods you were using and yeah, just what that has illuminated. Yeah, so these things are all again things that I wish I could have gone back to Zanzibar this summer to work more on. They were sort of nascently being developed in the field when I was working on them. The specific oral history project would be working with the family that is the descendants of the landowners at that site of Monocombo to trace the kind of family history at that place. And that was the main request is that the people there wanted to get that information available into schools and things like that. So it would be the idea of talking with elders there's there's apparently a very old man who lives in Zanzibar, Stone Town now who we were not able to get in contact with who is I think the oldest member of that family who I think remembers the the that house being occupied towards the end of its occupation that that stone building we were looking at. So that would be the project for oral history would be to maybe interview that person do interviews around the sugar plantation at that site. It is a little complicated right there's there's a lot of kind of there's the revolution in Zanzibar happened right in the 60s which dispossessed a lot of plantation owners. There's a whole political question about that and it's, it's something that it's a little fraught to discuss in some way so I'm, I'm still feeling it out. Anyways, is that basically an answer for Swahili translation. It's just a project that I've been working on with other Tanzanian scholars yeah. Awesome. Thank you. And so we have a question from YouTube. Can you stand a little bit on the concept of communal feeding and dining. What kind of evidence is there for this practice through different occupation period. Yeah, communal communal consumption basically like communal yeah. Yeah. So if we go back. This is an argument that mostly is has evidence from from Pemba which is the northern island of the Zanzibar archipelago. So it's it's based on a on two studies one is looking is a site survey like the one that I did, which looks at the development of sites from the probably about the eighth century into the 15th century and what it shows is a sort of a transition of sites from where you have the rural area sort of emptying and these larger towns building up into these more stratified societies. And there you have evidence for a transition from millet to right rice consumption and that's based on botanical evidence and that also coincides with a change in the ceramic styles from these kind of clothes jugs to more open bowls like the ones that you would use for rice consumption. So the argument is essentially that as you have the stratification of these societies and you have the development of local elites. You also have the the the dietary switch and you have the conversion to Islam, and you have the change in these bull forms so the argument is that there is like the communal feasting practices were ways for local elites to to cement their their authority basically to like throwing of large feasts and this is all kind of documented ethnographically as well. We're not ethnographically but but historically there are examples of this in the 19th century where you have. I mean it makes sense right if you like large feasts are sort of ways of of exhibiting your wealth in some ways that you can put on a large feast, you can put on a larger one that you have a certain status in the society. And so this phenomenon of putting bowls in set into coral limestone architecture. One scholar Jeffrey Fleischer he argues that this has not it's not just about displaying wealth from trade gained by acquiring these items from places like East Asia, but it also is about invoking the activity of feasting by by reminding the bulls themselves in a way because the bulls are what are used for the consumption of things like rice and curry. And especially this passage from Ibn Battuta, which you can read the whole thing it's all and it's if you Google Ibn Battuta and Mogadishu. It really describes this exact event happening it describes him coming into town being greeted by the ruler of Mogadishu and brought in for this big feast with all these with these open bowls which is what we find at these sites. I hope that explains it. Is this Asian rice from India or African red rice, it is Asian rice I believe it's. I'm forgetting the Latin name for it but I think the idea is that it comes. There's two possible routes of transmission and there's a paper about this which pretty recently which suggests that it is actually coming through Madagascar and up from rather than the traditional route which people thought is what it's coming through India and through the Arabian Peninsula and down into East Africa. So a kind of new theory postulates that possibly like Malagasy voyagers are the ones bringing this rice to East Africa, sometime around probably the eighth century or so. Yeah. Other questions. Yeah, so I guess, well, I have one other question which is just can you speak a little bit about the sort of genesis of this project. Like, how did you get started working here and yeah, how did you design this what's, yeah. Yeah, it's it's a long complicated process. I started working in East Africa. I because I studied Swahili in undergrad, and I ended up studying abroad in Kenya, where I learned about the archaeology of East Africa. So that's kind of how my interest in the region developed is through the language. So I'm really interested in I really like Swahili poetry and the Swahili language. And that kind of fed into my interest in the archaeology and then in terms of the archaeology itself. So the agriculture and the kind of the sort of political ecology and political economy of agricultural production I think is really fascinating and so site survey I saw as is one of the main ways to get at that kind of data about how people were living on the landscape and how that was changing in relation to agricultural production. Awesome. Thank you. And we have another question from YouTube, which is, can you say a little bit more about the Zanzibar drone mapping and that collaboration. Yeah, it's really not a collaboration that I'm part of it's just an open source thing that anyone can access so it was a collaboration between students at the State University of Zanzibar or Suza. And I believe some a drone company I forget the name of it, as well as I think the World Bank is involved in this too. And the Zanzibar Commission for Lands and so it was a project initiated just to get really high resolution imagery of both islands, pretty cheaply. It's great because satellite imagery of Zanzibar is almost always cloudy. It's really hard to get cloud free imagery. So having this super high resolution imagery that's totally free and open source and available for anyone to use is really helpful for me. So big shout out to the revolutionary government of Zanzibar and the Commission for Lands and the students at Suza. Yeah, you can just go to Zanzibar mapping initiative.org I think and download the imagery if you'd like, as long as you're treated to people. Yeah. That's very cool. I wish they have that for my study area. Well, thank you so much Wolfgang. This is a really interesting talk. And I hope everyone will join us next week to hear about Hawaii. Another island site. Yeah, great. Thank you very much.