A Material Culture focuses on objects in Swahili society through the elaboration of an approach that sees both people and things as caught up in webs of mutual interaction. It therefore provides both a new theoretical intervention in some of the key themes in material culture studies, including the agency of objects and the ways they were linked to social identities, through the development of the notion of a biography of practice.
These theoretical discussions are explored through the archaeology of the Swahili, on the Indian Ocean coast of eastern Africa. This coast was home to a series...

The Swahili World explores aspects of the archaeology, history, linguistics and anthropology of the eastern African coast. It covers a 1,500-year sweep of history, during which time the coast was initially settled, towns developed, people converted to Islam, and successive colonial regimes preceded the current nation states which make up the shoreline. The Swahili Age forms the backbone of this study, from approximately AD700 1500 and reflects the fact that most of our knowledge of this civilization comes from archaeology. However, with the inclusion of chapters from other...