While the impact of human activity on the environment is often seen in the contexts of the post-industrial era, new archaeological research has revealed how the medieval East African population changed their natural habitat forever.
Unguja Ukuu is an archaeological settlement on the Zanzibar Archipelago, Tanzania. It was a major port of trade in India Ocean during the first millennium, when the island was populated with farming societies that established trade links to the Indian Ocean, China, and beyond.
The latest research has been published in the Journal of Island and Coastal ArchaeologyThis article describes how human activities have altered the shoreline of Unguja Ukuu.
Urban growth along the coast and at the trade ports on the island may have sunk the lagoon, preventing sea traffic. This could have impacted fish populations and contributed to the community’s decline.
For millennia the Indian Ocean was the maritime setting of a budding form globalization. There were extensive trade networks between eastern Africa, South Arabia, and Southeast Asia that foreshadowed modern global shipping.
“The Zanzibar Archipelago islands witnessed many environmental and cultural change as the region became an important hub of maritime trade and cross-cultural interaction. This led to global exchange,” says Dr Ania Kortarba-Morley, senior lecturer in archaeology at Flinders.
These changes led to the dumping of food residues, general waste, and increased agricultural activity, all of which negatively affected sediment buildup along the island.
“While human impacts on the planet and the natural environment are a constant topic of current discourse, they almost always refer only to the present impacts and are focused on urban areas like large cities or agricultural areas.
Our study shows clearly how human interference in nature has affected coastal landforms and sediments on an East African island more than 1000 years ago. It also directly changes the fortunes for the people living there. Associate Professor Michael Morley is the senior author of the study. Mike Morley from Flinders University
The archaeologists used a variety standard and cutting-edge techniques in order to uncover new patterns that improve our understanding of the changes in sediment composition along the coast of local creeks and bays on the island, directly affected by human activity.
“To understand why and how these ancient ports flourished or declined, it is important that we know how the coastal landscape influenced traders’ commercial activities or drove decisions such as mooring locations and capital investments by local authorities and any central authorities.
Dr Kotarba Morley says that it is important to determine if the commercialization had an environmental effect, anthropogenically altering the landscape morphology, or causing change.
These processes may have been responsible for the decline and eventual abandonment Unguja Ukuu around the second millennium AD. This was a period of socio-political, economic and regional transformation of coastal African societies that saw the emergence and flourishing of maritime Swahili culture.
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