In this article, we examine an assumption about the historic Swahili of the eastern African coast: that they were a maritime society from their beginnings in the first millennium C.E. Based on historical and archaeological data, we suggest that, despite their proximity to and use of the sea, the level of maritimity of Swahili society increased greatly over time and was only fully realized in the early second millennium C.E. Drawing on recent theorizing from other areas of the world about maritimity as well as research on the Swahili, we discuss three arenas that distinguish first‐ and second‐millennium coastal society in terms of their maritime orientation. These are variability and discontinuity in settlement location and permanence; evidence of increased engagement with the sea through fishing and sailing technology; and specialized architectural developments involving port facilities, mosques, and houses. The implications of this study are that we must move beyond coastal location in determining maritimity; consider how the sea and its products were part of social life; and assess whether the marine environment actively influences and is influenced by broader patterns of sociocultural organization, practice, and belief within Swahili and other societies. [maritime, fishing and sailing, long‐distance trade, Swahili, eastern Africa]

This paper presents the results of a consensus-driven process identifying 50 priority research questions for historical ecology obtained through crowdsourcing, literature reviews, and in-person workshopping. A deliberative approach was designed to maximize discussion and debate with defined outcomes. Two in-person workshops (in Sweden and Canada) over the course of two years and online discussions were peer facilitated to define specific key questions for historical ecology from anthropological and archaeological perspectives. The aim of this research is to showcase the variety of questions that reflect the broad scope for historical-ecological research trajectories across scientific disciplines. Historical ecology encompasses research concerned with decadal, centennial, and millennial human-environmental interactions, and the consequences that those relationships have in the formation of contemporary landscapes. Six interrelated themes arose from our consensus-building workshop model: (1) climate and environmental change and variability; (2) multi-scalar, multi-disciplinary; (3) biodiversity and community ecology; (4) resource and environmental management and governance; (5) methods and applications; and (6) communication and policy. The 50 questions represented by these themes highlight meaningful trends in historical ecology that distill the field down to three explicit findings. First, historical ecology is fundamentally an applied research program. Second, this program seeks to understand long-term human-environment interactions with a focus on avoiding, mitigating, and reversing adverse ecological effects. Third, historical ecology is part of convergent trends toward transdisciplinary research science, which erodes scientific boundaries between the cultural and natural.

Since at least the 1960s, models of the transition to food production in East Africa have tended to be driven by various hypotheses derived from historical linguistics concerning the spread of various language families across the continent through the process of population migration. In more recent years, archaeologists, historians and historical linguists have offered various refinements to the initial models. This has certainly encouraged more nuanced reading of the different sources of evidence. However, such accounts rarely consider in any detail the possible variable rates of adoption or the different social conditions under which this occurred. Consequently, despite awareness of the likely complexity of the processes and the growing range of critiques, this critical transition in the history of East Africa is still widely thought of as having universally entailed the co-appearance and/or adoption of particular ‘packages’, namely cereal cultivation, iron smelting and proto-Bantu languages in the case of early farming communities, and domestic livestock and proto-Cushitic or Southern Nilotic languages in the case of early herders. In the former case, this transition is also often thought to be signalled in the archaeological record by a single diagnostic marker—the presence of Urewe and other Early Iron Age pottery styles. Building on the pioneering work of John Alexander in the application of ‘frontier theory’ to account for variable rates and mechanisms for the transition to agriculture, this paper offers a summary of the current state of knowledge regarding the transition to food production in parts of western and central Kenya.

It has long been recognized that archaeology in sub-Saharan Africa, and its public manifestation through the medium of museums, emerged within the context of European colonial rule, and that legacies of colonialism continue to shape archaeological practice across the continent. Following independence there has been steady indigenization, initially in terms of personnel but subsequently also in terms of organizational structure and research agendas. Recent calls for a ‘post-colonial archaeology’ liberated from the constraints imposed by ‘the colonial archive’, have highlighted many of the challenges that remain. Nevertheless, indigenization has also resulted in the production of more nationalistic and/or Afrocentric perspectives. These echo some of the sentiments voiced by the first generation of African political leaders regarding the need to recover a truly ‘African past’, which have also been revived in more recent calls for an African Renaissance as articulated by NEPAD, among others. This paper explores these developments so as to highlight some of the inconsistencies and inherent contradictions of current conceptualizations of postcolonial archaeology in sub-Saharan African contexts.

Recent decades have witnessed heightened public and governmental awareness of the nature and scale of environmental challenges likely to face the planet over the course of the next fifty to one hundred years. Scholars from across a broad range of disciplines have been drawn into these debates and have begun to reorient their research towards finding solutions to some of the most pressing problems and to devising more sustainable and resilient livelihoods. Archaeologists, with their conventional orientation toward past events and processes have been rather slower to engage with these issues. Recently, however, there has been a steady shift within the discipline so as to incorporate more future-oriented perspectives, and ‘the use of the past to plan for a better future’ is rapidly becoming a common theme within archaeological research projects and publications. While welcoming some of these developments, this paper offers a critical assessment of the various claims that are now being made of archaeology's p...

The exploratory investigation of two sites in Kenya throws new light on the transition from a ‘stone age’ to an ‘iron age’. The model of widespread cultural replacement by Bantu-speaking iron producers is questioned and instead the authors propose a long interaction with regional variations. In matters of lithics, ceramics, hunting, gathering, husbandry and cooking, East African people created local and eclectic packages of change between 1500BC and AD500.