Modelling the Swahili past: the archaeology of Mikindani in southern coastal Tanzania

Abstract

The Swahili of the East African coast formed one of the most studied and best known societies of Sub-Saharan African antiquity. The most popular model of Swahili society recognises their roots among Iron Age African communities but views them as largely facing outwards — away from the rest of Africa – and defines them primarily through their activities in the Indian Ocean sphere, especially their participation in inter-regional commerce and the integration of Middle Eastern Islamic culture into their lives. Building from the insights of projects studying connections between the coast and hinterland, this paper uses new evidence from the region around the town of Mikindani in southern Tanzania to show that some coastal communities in the Swahili world instead concentrated on interior connections and did not follow cosmopolitan Islamic sociocultural norms. Indeed, patterns in the Mikindani region departed from Swahili norms across a variety of measures during the early second millennium AD and suggest that certain portions of the Swahili coast would be better viewed facing into the African interior to a greater degree than toward the Indian Ocean.