Wolfgang Alders is an archaeologist specializing in early globalization and the emergence of interconnected urban societies across the eastern African Swahili Coast and the Indian Ocean. He received his PhD in anthropological archaeology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2022, and he was a National Science Foundation SBE Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies (CAST) at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville from 2022-2024. His dissertation investigated the archaeology of rural Swahili village communities in Zanzibar, Tanzania, charting their impacts on broader sociopolitical and urban transformations. As an NSF postdoctoral fellow, he directed the Zanzibar Urban-Rural Complexity Project (ZURCP), which used multitemporal satellite imagery and field surveys to investigate social connectivity and the political strategies of non-elites in the hinterland of the UNESCO World Heritage urban site of Zanzibar Stone Town. His work has developed geospatial and satellite remote sensing methods for archaeological research in tropical environments, and across landscapes impacted by rapid modern urbanization.
Currently, he is co-directing the Dynamic Coasts and Landscapes of Resilience (CALOR) project in coastal Tanzania in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Dar Es Salaam and the University of Sydney. The CALOR project uses LiDAR mapping, satellite remote sensing, and archaeological analyses to investigate the first agriculturalist migrations to the Tanzanian coast, early urbanism, long-distance connectivity, and ancient adaptations to climate change and catastrophic environmental disasters like tsunamis and floods. At ISAW, he is using environmental and satellite imagery datasets to build archaeological predictive models for the settlements of mobile fisher, farmer, and forager communities on the Tanzanian coast during the first millennium CE, when exchanges with the Indian Ocean world first intensified. These models will guide systematic archaeological surveys and inform understandings of ancient connectivity and early globalization.