Alison Crowther

Kuumbi Cave is one of a group of caves that underlie a flight of marine terraces in Pleistocene limestone in eastern Zanzibar (Indian Ocean). Drawing on the findings of geoarchaeological field survey and archaeological excavation, we discuss the formation and evolution of Kuumbi Cave and its wider littoral landscape. In the later part of the Quaternary (last ca. 250,000 years?), speleogenesis and terrace formation were driven by the interplay between glacioeustatic sea level change and crustal uplift at rates of ca. 0.10-0.20 mm/yr. Two units of backreef/reef limestone were deposited during ‘optimal’ (highest) highstands, tentatively correlated with MIS 7 and 5; (mainly) erosive marine terraces formed in these limestones in ‘suboptimal’ highstands. Kuumbi and other sub-terrace caves developed as flank margin caves, in the seaward portion of freshwater lenses during such ‘suboptimal’ highstands. Glacioeustacy-induced fluctuations of the groundwater table may have resulted in shifts from vadose (with deposition of well-developed speleothems) to phreatic/epiphreatic conditions in these caves. At Kuumbi, Late Pleistocene (pre-20,000 cal. BP) ceiling collapse initiated colluvial deposition near-entrance and opened the cave to large plants and animals, including humans. A phase of terminal Pleistocene human occupation ca. 18,500-17,000 cal. BP resulted in the deposition of a dense assemblage of Achatina spp. landsnails, alongside marine molluscs and mammal remains (including zebra, buffalo and other taxa now extinct on Zanzibar). The Holocene part of the cave stratigraphy near-entrance records phases of abandonment and intensified late Holocene human use.

With rising sea levels at the end of the Pleistocene, land-bridge or continental islands were formed around the world. Many of these islands have been extensively studied from a bio-geographical perspective, particularly in terms of impacts of island creation on terrestrial vertebrates. However, a majority of studies rely on contemporary faunal distributions rather than fossil data. Here, we present archaeological findings from the island of Zanzibar (also known as Unguja) off the eastern African coast, to provide a temporal perspective on island biogeography. The site of Kuumbi Cave, excavated by multiple teams since 2005, has revealed the longest cultural and faunal record for any eastern African island. This record extends to the Late Pleistocene, when Zanzibar was part of the mainland, and attests to the extirpation of large mainland mammals in the millennia after the island became separated. We draw on modeling and sedimentary data to examine the process by which Zanzibar was most recently separated from the mainland, providing the first systematic insights into the nature and chronology of this process. We subsequently investigate the cultural and faunal record from Kuumbi Cave, which provides at least five key temporal windows into human activities and faunal presence: two at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), one during the period of post-LGM rapid sea level rise and island formation, and two in the late Holocene (Middle Iron Age and Late Iron Age). This record demonstrates the presence of large mammals during the period of island formation, and their severe reduction or disappearance in the Kuumbi Cave sequence by the late Holocene. While various limitations, including discontinuity in the sequence, problematize attempts to clearly attribute

The exhibition of increasingly intensive and complex niche construction behaviors through time is a key feature of human evolution, culminating in the advanced capacity for ecosystem engineering exhibited by Homo sapiens. A crucial outcome of such behaviors has been the dramatic reshaping of the global bio-sphere, a transformation whose early origins are increasingly apparent from cumulative archaeological and paleoecological datasets. Such data suggest that, by the Late Pleistocene, humans had begun to engage in activities that have led to alterations in the distributions of a vast array of species across most, if not all, taxonomic groups. Changes to biodiversity have included extinctions, extirpations, and shifts in species composition, diversity, and community structure. We outline key examples of these changes, highlighting findings from the study of new datasets, like ancient DNA (aDNA), stable isotopes, and microfossils, as well as the application of new statistical and computational methods to datasets that have accumulated significantly in recent decades. We focus on four major phases that witnessed broad anthropogenic alterations to biodiversity—the Late Pleistocene global human expansion, the Neolithic spread of agriculture , the era of island colonization, and the emergence of early urbanized societies and commercial networks. Archaeological evidence documents millennia of anthropogenic transformations that have created novel ecosystems around the world. This record has implications for ecological and evolutionary research, conservation strategies, and the maintenance of ecosystem services, pointing to a significant need for broader cross-disciplinary engagement between archaeology and the biological and environmental sciences.

Recent archaeological research has firmly established eastern Africa’s offshore islands as important localities for understanding the region’s pre-Swahili maritime adaptations and early Indian Ocean trade con- nections. While the importance of the sea and small offshore islands to the development of urbanized and mercantile Swahili societies has long been recognized, the formative stages of island colonization—and in particular the processes by which migrating Iron Age groups essen- tially became “maritime”—are still relatively poorly understood. Here we present the results of recent archaeological fieldwork in the Mafia Archipelago, which aims to understand these early adaptations and situate them within a longer-term trajectory of island settlement and pre-Swahili cultural developments. We focus on the results of zooar- chaeological, archaeobotanical, and material culture studies relating to early subsistence and trade on this island to explore the changing significance of marine resources to the local economy. We also discuss the implications of these maritime adaptations for the development of local and long-distance Indian Ocean trade networks.

The Austronesian settlement of the remote island of Madagascar remains one of the great puzzles of Indo-Pacific prehistory. Although linguistic, ethnographic, and genetic evidence points clearly to a colonization of Madagascar by Austronesian language-speaking people from Island Southeast Asia, decades of archaeological research have failed to locate evidence for a Southeast Asian signature in the island’s early material record. Here, we present new archaeobotanical data that show that Southeast Asian settlers brought Asian crops with them when they settled in Africa. These crops provide the first, to our knowledge, reliable archaeological window into the South- east Asian colonization of Madagascar. They additionally suggest that initial Southeast Asian settlement in Africa was not limited to Madagascar, but also extended to the Comoros. Archaeobotanical data may support a model of indirect Austronesian colonization of Madagascar from the Comoros and/or elsewhere in eastern Africa.

Recent archaeological excavations at the seventh-to tenth-century CE sites of Unguja Ukuu and Fukuchani on Zanzibar Island have produced large numbers of glass beads that shed new light on the island's early interactions with the wider Indian Ocean world. A selected sample of the beads recovered was analyzed by laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) to determine the origins of the glass used to make the beads and potential trade relationships are considered. The data show that two major glass types can be identified: mineral-soda glass, m-Na-Al, produced in Sri Lanka (and possibly South India) and plant ash soda glass. The latter comprises three subtypes: two with low alumina concentrations and different quantities of lime (here designated v-Na-Ca subtypes A and B) and one with high alumina (designated v-Na-Al). The v-Na-Ca subtype A beads are chemically similar to Sasanian type 1 glass as well as Zhizo beads found in southern Africa, while v-Na-Ca sub-type B compares reasonably well with glasses from Syria and

Occupants of coastal and island eastern Africa—now known as the 'Swahili coast'—were involved in long-distance trade with the Indian Ocean world during the later first millennium CE. Such exchanges may be traced via the appearance of non-native animals in the archaeofaunal record; additionally, this record reveals daily culinary practises of the members of trading communities and can thus shed light on subsistence technologies and social organisation. Yet despite the potential contributions of faunal data to Swahili coast archaeology, few detailed zooarchaeological studies have been conducted. Here, we present an analysis of faunal remains from new excavations at two coastal Zanzibar trading locales: the small settlement of Fukuchani in the northwest and the larger town of Unguja Ukuu in the southwest. The occurrences of non-native fauna at these sites—Asian black rat (Rattus rattus) and domestic chicken (Gallus gallus), as well as domestic cat (Felis catus)—are among the earliest in eastern Africa. The sites contrast with one another in their emphases on wild and domestic fauna: Fukuchani's inhabitants were economically and socially engaged with the wild terrestrial realm, evidenced not only through diet but also through the burial of a cache of wild bovid metatarsals. In contrast, the town of Unguja Ukuu had a domestic economy reliant on caprine herding, alongside more limited chicken keeping, although hunting or trapping of wild fauna also played an important role. Occupants of both sites were focused on a diversity of near-shore marine resources, with little or no evidence for the kind of venturing into deeper waters that would have required investment in new technologies. Comparisons with contemporaneous sites suggest that some of the patterns at Fukuchani and Unguja Ukuu are not replicated elsewhere. This diversity in early Swahili coast foodways is essential to discussions of the agents engaged in long-distance maritime trade.

The spread of agriculture across sub-Saharan Africa has long been attributed to the large-scale migration of Bantu-speaking groups out of their west Central African homeland from about 4000 years ago. These groups are seen as having expanded rapidly across the sub-continent, carrying an 'Iron Age' package of farming, metal-working, and pottery, and largely replacing pre-existing hunter-gatherers along the way. While elements of the 'traditional' Bantu model have been deconstructed in recent years, one of the main constraints on developing a more nuanced understanding of the local processes involved in the spread of farming has been the lack of detailed archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological sequences, particularly from key regions such as eastern Africa. Situated at a crossroads between continental Africa and the Indian Ocean, eastern Africa was not only a major corridor on one of the proposed Bantu routes to southern Africa, but also the recipient of several migrations of pastoral groups from the north. In addition, eastern Africa saw the introduction of a range of domesticates from India, Southeast Asia, and other areas of the Indian Ocean sphere through long-distance maritime connections. The possibility that some Asian crops, such as the vegecultural 'tropical trio' (banana, taro, and yam), arrived before the Bantu expansion has in particular raised many questions about the role of eastern Africa's non-agricultural communities in the adoption and subsequent diffusion of crops across the continent. Drawing on new botanical and faunal evidence from recent excavations at a range of hunter-gatherer and early farming sites on eastern Africa's coast and offshore islands, and with comparison to inland sites, this paper will examine the timing and tempo of the agricultural transition, the nature of forager-farmer-pastoralist interactions, and the varying roles that elements of the 'Bantu package', pastoralism, and non-African domesticates played in local economies. This paper highlights the complex pathways and transitions that unfolded, as well as how eastern Africa links into a broader global picture of heterogeneous, dynamic, and extended transformations from forager to farmer that challenge our fundamental understanding of pre-modern Holocene societies.

Most of our current knowledge of late Pleistocene African bone technology is drawn from southern African sites, with recent discoveries indicating that bone- and stone-tipped arrows (propelled by a bow) were in use prior to 60,000 years BP. Integration of archaeological with ethnographic data similarly suggests that hunting with poison-tipped arrows on the African continent has an antiquity of at least 24,000 years. Unfortunately, similar analysis of material from eastern Africa is largely absent and consequently, with the sole exception of barbed points, we know very little regarding osseous technology in this region and how similar or dissimilar it is to contexts located further south. This paper presents a small assemblage of seven bone artefacts recovered from the late Pleistocene deposits of Kuumbi Cave, Zanzibar. Comparison of the bone projectile points, a bone awl and a notched bone tube with ethnographic and archaeological material from throughout the Sub-Saharan region suggests that, as elsewhere in Africa, bone technology was a central element in the Later Stone Age material culture repertoire of Kuumbi Cave’s inhabitants. It also suggests that arrow points coated with poison were in use in eastern Africa around 13,000 years BP.

http://archaeobotany.dept.shef.ac.uk/wiki/index.php/Main_Page This Online Archaeobotany Tutorial is a product of the European Union funded Integrated Archaeobotanical Research project conducted at the University of Sheffield from 2007 - 2009. It was a Marie Curie Framework 6 Transfer of Knowledge program employing archaeobotanical researchers from across Europe and Australia. Charred seeds and fruits recovered from archaeological sites are traditionally used to reconstruct past diet, subsistence strategies and plant economy. The Integrated Archaeobotanical Research (IAR) project aimed to bring together all aspects of archaeobotanical research to focus on economic interpretations of plant remains and develop complementary research strategies. This tutorial contains sections on Wood Charcoal, Charred Seeds and Fruits, Charred Roots and Tubers, Waterlogged Plant Remains, Pollen, Phytoliths and Starch. Each tutorial provides information on the history of the discipline, how to sample fo...

Archaeobotany is the study of plant remains from archaeological contexts. Despite Australasian research being at the forefront of several methodological innovations over the last three decades, archaeobotany is now a relatively peripheral concern to most archaeological projects in Australia and New Guinea. In this paper, many practicing archaeobotanists working in these regions argue for a more central role for archaeobotany in standard archaeological practice. An overview of archaeobotanical techniques and applications is presented, the potential for archaeobotany to address key historical research questions is indicated, and initiatives designed to promote archaeobotany and improve current practices are outlined.

Environmentally transformative human use of land accelerated with the emergence of agriculture, but the extent, trajectory, and implications of these early changes are not well understood. An empirical global assessment of land use from 10,000 years before the present (yr B.P.) to 1850 CE reveals a planet largely transformed by hunter-gatherers, farmers, and pastoralists by 3000 years ago, considerably earlier than the dates in the land-use reconstructions commonly used by Earth scientists. Synthesis of knowledge contributed by more than 250 archaeologists highlighted gaps in archaeological expertise and data quality, which peaked for 2000 yr B.P. and in traditionally studied and wealthier regions. Archaeological reconstruction of global land-use history illuminates the deep roots of Earth’s transformation and challenges the emerging Anthropocene paradigm that large-scale anthropogenic global environmental change is mostly a recent phenomenon.