Early Globalization and Ancient Connectivity on the Eastern African Swahili Coast:

This lecture will take place in person at ISAW.

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How did hunters, pastoralists and small-scale farmers initiate the earliest forms of connectivity between coastal eastern Africa and the Indian Ocean world in the early-mid first millennium CE? Furthermore, to what extent did these interactions ultimately produce the cosmopolitan Swahili urban network, across thousands of kilometers of coastline from Somalia to Mozambique?  To address these questions, this talk discusses recent LiDAR and archaeological field survey results of the newly initiated Dynamic Coasts and Landscapes of Resilience (CALOR) Project in Pangani Bay, in northern Tanzania. This project is exploring ancient eastern African connectivity between eastern African river systems and the maritime coast to investigate the long-term socio-ecological adaptations that impacted the nature and timing of early globalization. Low population densities, the persistence of mobile hunters and pastoralists interacting with settled communities, and the absence of centralized territorial states make the region an interesting case study for thinking about relationships between political power, urbanization, and long-distance exchange.

Wolfgang Alders is a Visiting Research Scholar at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropological Archaeology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2022, his Masters from Berkeley in 2016, and his B.A. in Archaeology from Johns Hopkins University in 2014. His research focuses on the emergence of interconnected urban societies and early globalization in eastern Africa and across the Indian Ocean.

The lecture will be followed by a reception.

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