Inland Connectivity in Ancient Tanzania

Abstract

This research note emphasizes human entanglement inland of the East African marine coastal fringe, but tied to it and to the Swahili World, c . ad 750–1550. Social, economic, political, and ritual intersections developed between late pre-urban/urban communities and their countrysides.1 Stone towns on the Swahili Coast administered countrysides, produced and marketed items for long-distance exchange, and emulated elite Islamic ritual and religious styles and products to build nodes of authority.2 By the 1990s, each of these interpretations of coastal towns created a potential role for non-coastal, African communities and inland goods in coastal livelihoods, whether Islamic Swahili or otherwise. In effect, theoretical advances in archaeology on the coast opened a pathway to challenge previous caricatures of disconnected and static inland people found in early Eurasian travelogues and post-independence colonialist scholarship. This potential has yet to be met.