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 influence the earliest connections between coastal eastern Africa and the Indian Ocean world in the early-mid first millennium CE? Furthermore, to what extent did these interactions shape the eventual emergence of the cosmopolitan Swahili urban network, across thousands of kilometers of coastline from Somalia to Mozambique?  Framing these questions within archaeological understandings of early globalization, this lecture reviews historical sources and archaeological evidence for early trade interactions between eastern Africa, the classical world, and the interconnected societies of the ancient western Indian Ocean. Next, the talk presents preliminary 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 the socio-ecological conditions of early exchange, urbanization, and settlement reorganization at the interface of an eastern African river system and the maritime coast. Low population densities, the persistence of specialized hunters and pastoralists interacting with settled communities, and heterarchical forms of social organization make the region an important case study for thinking about relationships between power, urbanization, and early exchange networks in a global perspective.

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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