Fleisher & Wynne-Jones, Finding Meaning

Afr Archaeol Rev (2012) 29:171–207 DOI 10.1007/s10437-012-9121-0 ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Finding Meaning in Ancient Swahili Spatial Practices

Jeffrey Fleisher & Stephanie Wynne-Jones

# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012

Abstract The development of the Swahili world involved new ways of organizing and conceiving of space. Archaeology and historical linguistics are both crucial in charting the trajectory of changing spatial practice during the late first and early second millennium AD, yet their respective datasets have been correlated only in specific and restricted ways. In this paper, we take the first steps toward working between archaeological and historical linguistic data to understand the changing contexts and meanings of Swahili spatial practice. We develop this argument in three parts. First, we review archaeological approaches to space in the Swahili world and develop a holistic view of towns, including both confined and delimited space. Second, we offer an archaeologists’ perspective on the development of historical linguistics in relation to the Swahili world, exploring the changing relationship between linguistics and archaeology and arguing for a greater appreciation of context in how archaeological materials are deployed with linguistic data. Finally, drawing on new data from Songo Mnara, a fourteenth–sixteenth-century Swahili town on the southern Tanzania coast, we make a preliminary attempt to reconcile some aspects of the archaeological and linguistic datasets. Using published lexical innovations, we suggest ways that meaning might be found alternatively in archaeological and linguistic data. Our hope is to make some tentative steps toward a mutually satisfying way of working between disciplines.

Résumé Le développement du monde swahili entraîna de nouveaux modes d’organisation et de conception de l'espace. L'archéologie et la linguistique historique ont un rôle décisif à jouer dans l’analyse des pratiques d’utilisation de l’espace à la fin du premier et au début du second millénaire av. J.-C. Ceci étant dit, leurs ensembles de données respectifs n'ont été intégrés que de manière spécifique et restreinte. Dans cette communication, nous faisons les premiers pas

J. Fleisher (*) Department of Anthropology MS20, Rice University, P.O. Box 1892, Houston, TX 77251, USA e-mail: [email protected]

S. Wynne-Jones Department of Archaeology, University of York, King’s Manor, York YO1 7EP, UK e-mail: [email protected] 172 Afr Archaeol Rev (2012) 29:171–207 vers une méthode de travail intégrant les données archéologiques et linguistiques historiques pour comprendre les contextes et significations des pratiques spatiales swahilis, et leur évolution. Notre thèse est en trois parties. D'abord, nous passons en revue les méthodes archéologiques à l’égard de l'espace dans le monde Swahili, et développons une conception holistique des villes qui comprend les espaces restreints et bornés. Ensuite, nous offrons une perspective archéologique sur l'évolution de la linguistique historique par rapport au monde Swahili. Notre analyse explore le changement de relation entre la linguistique et l'archéologie, et plaide pour une meilleure prise en compte du contexte permettant l’association de leurs données respectives. Finalement, nous mettons à contribution de nouvelles données provenant de Songo Mnara, une ville swahili datant du XIVème- XVIème siècle située sur la côte sud de la Tanzanie, afin de réconcilier certains aspects des données archéologiques et linguistiques. Avec l'aide d'innovations lexicologiques publiées, nous suggérons des méthodes pour recouvrir les modes de signification dans les matériaux archéologiques ou linguistiques. Nous espér- ons avoir fait quelques pas initiaux vers une méthode de travail mutuellement satisfaisante entre les disciplines.

Keywords Swahili coast . Spatial practices . Historical linguistics . Household archaeology. Commemoration . Meaning

Introduction

Spatial concerns are at the heart of reconstructions of the Swahili past, whether conceived as the spatial movement of people along the coastal corridor (Fig. 1; Allen 1993; Nurse & Spear 1985), the organization of space in towns (Horton 1994, 1996; Kusimba 1996), or the social uses of space within houses themselves (Donley-Reid 1987). It may be possible to argue, in fact, that the development of the Swahili world itself was based on new ways of organizing and conceiving of space. Such transformations include increasing participation of coastal people in the Indian Ocean world of commerce, in which they either learned about or visited once unknown and distant places; the changing nature of coastal settlement from small-scale, agricultural and fishing communities at the end of the first millennium to densely settled urban centers by the middle of the second; and the increasingly divided and segregated personal spaces that made up coastal towns, and their relationships with nearby agricultural settlements. In historical and archaeological renderings of the Swahili past, however, spatial understandings often serve only as a backdrop to historical changes or as reflections of social structures and patterns. For example, common ways of conceiving the Swahili spatial past are theories of town plans representing moiety or clan divisions (el-Zein 1974; Ghaidan 1975; Horton 1994; Prins 1961) and the organization of houses as markers of class or gender distinctions (Donley-Reid 1990a). Only rarely have coastal researchers asked why or how it came to be that spatial forms represented social organization. We thus need to ask questions about the processes whereby social structure came to be reflected in town plans and spaces, if at all, and to what extent ethnographic ideas of space may be found in historical antecedents. These processes might involve the functional or prosaic acts of Afr Archaeol Rev (2012) 29:171–207 173 inhabiting and using a place, but may alsobeunderstoodmoreinstrumentally, through the negotiations and acts of powerful people. The process of creating place in the Swahili world is also, we argue, a fruitful avenue for collaboration between historical linguistics and archaeology. Acts of

Fig. 1 The East African Coast 174 Afr Archaeol Rev (2012) 29:171–207 defining, creating, and inhabiting space are parts of the Swahili lexicon; the exploration of chronology for these concepts can offer an important means of historicizing spatial models which are currently heavily dependent on contemporary, ethnographic examples. A focus on activities and toponyms within Swahili towns also appears to fit well with the current concerns of historical linguists and their recent attention to meaning and worldview. Rather than trying to reconcile entire language groups with archaeological cultures, particular concepts may be traced through time and may be directly linked to the material record. This draws on the potential of context within archaeology, which allows us to explore meaning and activity in the past and is a crucial feature of our research. As such, this paper develops two concurrent strands of argument. First, we provide a review of archaeological approaches to space in the Swahili world, specifically the townscapes of the East African coast. We advocate attention to processes of creation in our considerations of place and argue that this must encompass a broad range of urban spaces across which life was structured. This review seeks to expand out from the traditional focus on houses and mosques, while recognizing the important contributions made through a focus on them. Many of these are landmark studies that have enhanced our knowledge immensely but now require contextualization within the wider area of the town. Second, we offer an archaeologists’ perspective on the development of historical linguistics in relation to the Swahili world, exploring in particular the relationship between linguistics and archaeology. Again, this section takes the form of a review, cataloguing the changeable relationship between the disciplines (see also de Luna et al. 2012). We attempt to demonstrate that recent decades have seen similar, but separate, trajectories in the two disciplines that have led them to arrive at a comparable set of concerns. In the final section, we consider how these shared concerns might be approached in a study of Swahili urban space and make a preliminary attempt to reconcile some aspects of the two datasets. This explores spatial words found among the reconstructed lexical innovations for proto- Sabaki, proto-Swahili, and northern and southern Swahili dialects (drawn from Nurse and Hinnebusch 1993; Table 1) and makes comparison with the changing spaces known from archaeological data. We draw on the case study of Songo Mnara, Tanzania, where high-resolution archaeological data relating to space are becoming available (Fleisher & Wynne-Jones 2010; Wynne-Jones & Fleisher 2010, 2011). As

Table 1 Reconstructed protolanguages/dialects and approximate date of emergence (from Nurse and Hinnebusch 1993)

Protolanguage Date

Proto Northeast Coast (PNEC) AD 1 Proto-Sabaki (PSA) AD500 Proto-Swahili (PSW) AD600–700 Northern dialects (ND) AD800–1200 a Southern dialects (SD) ?AD800–1200 a Nurse and Hinnebusch (1993:513) do not provide dates for SD due to the lack of archaeological research published at the time of publication; however, research since that time on the northern Tanzanian coast and islands has indicated dates similar to those for ND, perhaps even earlier Afr Archaeol Rev (2012) 29:171–207 175 should be clear, we present the consideration of space as one avenue of study for the development of a common agenda and an important context in which to explore issues of social memory, political authority, and town-based production and consumption. It is by no means the only possible route, and similar considerations might be given to food practice, material culture, or landscape. Instead, we hope to make some tentative steps towards a mutually satisfying way of working between disciplines.

Swahili Urbanism and the Use and Meaning of Space

Although there are many published plans of ancient Swahili towns (Kirkman 1964; Sassoon 1981; Wilson 1982), only a few archaeologists have addressed the functions and structure of urban space (see Gensheimer 1997; Horton 1994, 1996; Kusimba 1996; Wilson 1979a, 1982). Most studies have focused on questions of chronology and development (Abungu 1989; Chittick 1974, 1984; Horton 1996; Juma 2004; Wilson and Omar 1997), or on contextualizing towns within their broader regions. This has ushered in a consideration of urban function with relation to a wider hinterland or the Indian Ocean world (Abungu 1994-5; Chami 1994; Fawcett & LaViolette 1990; Fleisher 2003, 2010a; Helm 2000; Kusimba 2008; LaViolette & Fleisher 2005; LaViolette et al. 1989; Schmidt et al. 1992; Wilson 1982; Wright 1993; Wynne-Jones 2007a, b) enabling us to understand their position as the remains of an African society with a long history and a rich and diverse range of relationships with inland groups (Abungu 1989; Chami 1994, 1998; Horton 1996; Kwekason 2010; Pawlowicz 2011). Furthermore, a functional approach to urbanism has moved the object of analysis away from definition, and towards process, in thinking through the role of a town. Yet this focus on process has rarely been applied within the urban milieu. Studies of individual towns have concentrated mainly on the understanding of the built structures that make up the spaces rather than the overall townscape. In general, this work has focused on mosques and coral-built houses, the study of which has been important in understanding the emergence of Islamic practice (e.g., Horton 1991) and the social life of elite town residents (e.g., Donley-Reid 1987). A concurrent research agenda has explored the archaeology of non-coral (or “stone”) sections of the urban layout, in an attempt to include the “hidden majority” in our understandings of Swahili towns (Fleisher & LaViolette 1999; Gensheimer 1997: 249-250). The recognition of substantial wattle-and-daub components among and around the stone-built sections of the Swahili town has led to a much greater appreciation of diversity in urban form (LaViolette & Fleisher 2009). Comparison of fourteenth–fifteenth-century town layouts (Wynne-Jones & Fleisher n.d.) has revealed that, beyond certain regularities in terms of central mosques and their architectural style, town divisions into quarters, orthogonal layouts, or ratios of earth-and-thatch to stone architecture are far more variable, if at all discernable. This suggests that urban layouts were diverse and complex, a conclusion that is supported by the results of stonetown excavations at Kilwa (Chittick 1974), Shanga (Horton 1996), Mtwapa (Kusimba 1993, 1996), and Chwaka (LaViolette & Fleisher 2009). Studies of urban layout have tended to follow implicitly the association made by Horton (1994) between monumentality, spatial form, and architecture, invoking the 176 Afr Archaeol Rev (2012) 29:171–207 maneuverings of urban elite (e.g., Gensheimer 1997; Kusimba 2008; Wright 1993). Horton’s(1994) analysis of the early town plan of Shanga (Fig. 2), in northern Kenya, argues for the importance of social structure in the creation of urban form. In the initial stages of its development in the eighth century AD, Shanga contained a central enclosure with seven gateways, surrounded by the domestic architecture of the town. Another wall enclosed this settlement, containing only four gateways on the cardinal axes. Horton argued that the central area would have been the site of the market, as well as of communal rituals or activities; it was also the location of the congregational mosque, constructed in wattle-and-daub and replaced in stone in the tenth century AD. The arrangement of houses around this center was associated with different occupa- tional or ethnic groups (Horton & Mudida 1993). This model, Horton argues, structures the spatial organization of Shanga throughout its 600-year occupation, even while the central area surrounding the mosque is filled with coral-built houses from the thirteenth century onwards (Fig. 3). Horton’s model of Swahili space is thus one in which the spatial layout of the town reflects or materializes established social relations; as he suggested (1994: 147), the planning of the settlement was “a map with which to express elements of their social and kinship structures.” This introduced an

Fig. 2 Early settlement plan at Shanga, Lamu archipelago, Kenya (from Horton 1996) Afr Archaeol Rev (2012) 29:171–207 177

Fig. 3 Final plan of Shanga, Kenya, early fifteenth century (adapted from Horton 1996) important link between urban space and social factors, although attempts to locate this arrangement elsewhere have met with only limited success (Horton & Middleton 2000: 121-3; Pradines 2004). The model is also open to criticism in its anachronistic use of historical sources, claims to universality, and its essentializing nature (Gensheimer 1997: 331). Similarly, Gensheimer (1997), in a reevaluation of Gedi, also on the Kenyan coast, stressed the way that Swahili town plans reflected social circumstances, arguing (1997: 258) that that “the built environment functioned to frame social circumstances and mediate social tensions through the formalization and institutionalization of social practices.” Like Horton, Gensheimer (1997: 254) sees the construction and organization of Gedi as evidence of social and political acts; for example, he under- stands the construction of town walls as acts that defined social classes, with elite members of society within and those others without, an idea that he supports through the didemic structure of later Swahili towns. He also views elite stonehouses as representations of political authority: “Palace structures served to enable and formal- ize the political structure of the Swahili city, providing a setting for the rituals and ceremonies which symbolized municipalauthorityontheEastAfricancoast” (Gensheimer 1997: 258). Research on the Swahili coast is therefore leading archaeologists toward a more complex approach to spatial concerns. The history of scholarship in the region suggests the key importance of processes of place-making in the creation of an urban culture; the investment in mosques and stonehouses is but one aspect of this, although 178 Afr Archaeol Rev (2012) 29:171–207 they are of enduring importance in the coastal world. We thus follow Wilson (1982: 207) in his call for attention to the entire range of urban space, including all types of structure and the spaces created and maintained in the ways they were patterned, especially the distinction he made between “confined” and “delimited space.” The former is coterminous with interior, architectural spaces, while the latter is “formed by the arrangement or occurrence of structures or natural features upon the settlement landscape.” This definition captures well the important linkage between interior and exterior space, especially in urban contexts where much of the outdoor space is itself defined—or delimited—by architecture. Rather than simply regarding material settings as passive reflections of social structure, practice-oriented archaeologies have led scholars away from instrumental explanations of elite control and toward explanations that favor activity and use in the shaping of the urban world (Wynne-Jones & Fleisher n.d., 2012). In this, Swahili archaeology is part of a broader move within the discipline to recognize the limitations of instrumental approaches and to recognize the “bottom-up” elements of place-making in past societies (Joyce 2004; Smith 2007). Household archaeologies are moving to incorporate areas of domestic activity that extend beyond the walls of the houses themselves (Hutson et al. 2007; Robin 2002; Robin & Rothschild 2002), and putatively “empty” spaces are considered as the settings for important activities or the result of particular aesthetic or spatial logics (Fox 1996; Low 2000; Moore 1996; Smith 2008). In this context, the move to recognize the full range of spaces in Swahili towns is timely, bringing together a series of existing trajectories in the archaeology of this area. Such an approach also unites the many ways that material settings and the creation of certain types of space have been shown to be important to the ancient Swahili, in an appreciation of the processes of place-making that created their particular world. In what follows, we review a range of spatial settings that existed in Swahili towns and how they have been examined to date.

Mosques and Houses

Islam is invoked as providing the cosmological framework through which the Swahili world was experienced (el-Zein 1974; Ghaidan 1975); the centrality of the mosque in many contemporary settlements has been seen as reflecting its enduring social significance (Gensheimer 1997; Horton & Middleton 2000). Horton (1996)has argued that the central location of the mosque at Shanga testifies to the importance of Islam from the earliest centuries as a powerful force in organizing daily life in the town (see also Wilson 1982; Wright 1993). The ruins of ancient mosques are often the only remaining structures on pre-sixteenth-century Swahili sites and have been an important focus of archaeological attention (Abungu 1994; Chittick 1974; Horton 1991; Kirkman 1954; Pradines 2001). Swahili mosque architecture was once understood as evidence for Arab/Persian colonization; more recently, Swahili mosques have been recognized as a unique, local, contribution to Islamic architecture (Garlake 2002:175)andindicatorsofparticularIslamicsects(Horton1996:419-423). Mosques at Swahili sites have served as a proxy measure for Islamic communities within the town, their prominent positioning seen as indicative of the central position of Islam in Swahili life from at least the eleventh century AD and their chronological development standing as illustration of the development of Islamic adherence Afr Archaeol Rev (2012) 29:171–207 179

(Horton 1991). Archaeologists have also suggested that mosques had a symbolic role within a larger landscape, seeing investment in elaborate examples as signifying the religious commitment of elite town dwellers, providing an important focal point for a regional population (LaViolette & Fleisher 2009; see also Fleisher 2010a). Likewise, Fleisher (2010b) has argued that particular architectural features in central mosques, such as displays of imported bowls, may represent the power and authority of local leaders to act as patrons to urban residents. Alongside mosques, Swahili stonehouses also loom large in our understandings of urban space. The house is seen as the material expression of the concept of wa-ungwana, the “owners” or long-term inhabitants (Allen 1979: 5). Ethnographies have provided guidance for many archaeological reconstructions, as well as an idealized model through which these houses are explored, associated with a scale of ascending privacy, or “intimacy gradient” (Allen 1979; Ghaidan 1971, 1975). This plan has reified notions of the use of space in Swahili stonehouses, applied to structures as far back as the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries AD; it structures the ways that both economic and ritual concerns are seen to have operated in the houses. In particular, the model was taken up in the work of Linda Donley-Reid, who also drew on Giddens’ (1984) theory of structuration to incorporate daily practice and notions of lived space into a demonstration of how people, objects, and spaces were given meaning through the activities conducted within the house (Donley 1982; Donley-Reid 1987, 1990a, b). Donley-Reid conducted some of the only spatially oriented stonehouse excavations in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Swahili houses of Lamu and Pate; these showed a range of ritual activities and deposits within the ndani or most private area (Donley-Reid 1987). Space was therefore linked to cosmological principles of order, purity, and Islam inscribed through ritual practice (Donley 1982: 70; Donley-Reid 1990a: 120). An unresolved alternative for understanding the Swahili house is in its link to the economic world of coastal commerce. The apparent permanence of the stonehouse has been seen as an important guarantee on the conduct of trade (Allen 1979; Horton 1994: 166). The house was also the location for trading activity, with negotiations being conducted in the porch or front areas of the houses, and a guest room for visiting merchants near this entrance allowing for hospitality on the part of the patron. Thus, the houses were simultaneously the setting for commerce and a guarantee on the deals transacted, embodying the important concepts of hospitality/generosity (with their corresponding implication of obligation/reciprocity), of civility, and of trustworthiness. This, it is argued, had a fundamental effect on their layout and design (Allen 1979; Gensheimer 2001: 37). Stonehouses also served to create new spaces for domestic and social activity, with attached, walled open spaces, including courtyards and compounds, which are a common feature of coral-built houses, from the simplest single structures to more complex multi-house ones. Courtyards could be simple affairs, open spaces within house walls, or more complex, such as the stepped and sunken courtyards at Songo Mnara and other prominent stonetowns (Kusimba 1999a: 149). Kusimba (1999a) terms these courtyards kiwanda and suggests that they were places for cooking and laundry (see also Kirkman 1956). In addition, outdoor compounds were created by walls extending out from houses to enclose spaces often larger than the house itself (Horton 1996: 48; Kirkman 1956: 98). Horton has suggested that compounds may 180 Afr Archaeol Rev (2012) 29:171–207 have been for keeping stock, with some evidence at Shanga of cattle dung and possible architectural evidence of wooden stalls affixed to the compound walls. They may also have been places to grow high-value crops (such as betel nut; Horton 1996: 48); similarly, Kusimba (1999a: 149) argues that they were places for small flower and vegetable gardens. The built structures or institutions of the town—mosque and house—have therefore been fundamental to Swahili spatial understandings, approached in a variety of ways. These confined spaces have, however, rarely been considered as part of an overall town layout. Such analyses as there are have followed an implicit assumption that town layout and the layout of the individual structures within the town reflect social structure. Thus, centrality is equated with importance, grandeur with authority, and function with origin.

Walls and Causeways

Perhaps the most recognizable delimiter of space in Swahili towns were town walls, which may or may not have served a defensive function (Pradines 2004; Horton & Middleton 2000: 125; LaViolette 2004) and most of which date to the fifteenth century. Whether linked to defensive or symbolic concerns, town walls served to restrict movement and delineate the boundaries of the settlement, creating a distinction between places inside and those beyond. The delimiting of space through walls or stockades was not limited to settlements built in stone, as Prins (1961: 90) notes that many contemporary villages were surrounded by stockades as well. Other architectural developments that served to bound urban space were efforts to control coastal zones, either through the construction of sea walls (Chittick 1984: 19-35) or mangrove palisades (Horton & Middleton 2000: 125). These efforts may have been focused on retaining eroding coastlines, or the creation of new areas to build mosques and houses. Recent research in the Kilwa archipelago has discovered a set of features that may have been involved in delimiting space: a series of causeways (Pollard 2008a; Pollard et al. 2012), coral-rag jetties 6–12 m wide, extending out up to 250 m perpendicular to the coastline. E. Pollard (Pollard 2008a: 277-8) has dated these to the period of monumental construction at Kilwa and Songo Mnara, thirteenth–sixteenth centuries AD and offered a number of suggestions as to their use: navigation aids, breakwaters for settlements and landing places, or territorial boundaries for use and exploitation of marine resources. Pollard et al.(2012) have also argued that the causeways were “part of the emerging spatial practices of town building in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries …in which monumental constructions were an emphatic way of altering the natural landscape to assert a transformed cultural world,” extending the material setting of the town to encompass areas associated with maritime activity.

Open Spaces and Cemeteries

Less attention has been given to the open spaces of Swahili towns (for exception, Gensheimer 1997; Horton 1994). Most discussions of open areas have been based on guesses and suppositions, or on analogies from twentieth-century ethnographic research. This leaves our important understandings of structures somewhat adrift Afr Archaeol Rev (2012) 29:171–207 181 within urban space. Interpretations of open spaces have generally addressed them in two ways: as functional spaces and settings for particular types of activities, and as central parts of a spatial plan that represent the social organization of Swahili society. The functional interpretations of open spaces in Swahili towns include: open-air meeting places (Garlake 2002) or market areas; protected space for future town growth (Kusimba 1993: 122, 1996: 711); gardens and/or orchards (Garlake 2002; Kusimba 1993); areas of impermanent architecture (Fleisher & LaViolette 1999; Kusimba 1999a); or areas of industrial production (Kusimba 1993: 122; Garlake 2002; Gensheimer 1997: 328-339). In exploring certain parts of seemingly open spaces in towns, archaeologists on Pemba Island and at Gedi, Kenya, have demon- strated they were actually dense with earth-and-thatch houses (Koplin and LaViolette 2008; LaViolette & Fleisher 2009); at Shanga, evidence of possible trade kiosks was located in the central open space of the town. In addition to the economic functions of urban space, there were likely more ceremonial and ritual aspects to Swahili public areas. Early sixteenth-century Portuguese accounts indicate that the sultan of Kilwa was crowned in an open space adjacent to the palace, while specially designated areas in Comorian cities, called fumboni, were contexts for social gatherings, weddings, feasts, and game playing (Gensheimer 1997: 334). The feasts and communal events mentioned in the historical data have been hinted at in the archaeology of Chwaka (Fleisher 2010b; LaViolette & Fleisher 2009) and Vumba Kuu (Wynne-Jones 2010). Open spaces were also fundamentally linked with memorialization and display, as imposing and decorative tombs surround the qiblasofmosquesandsometimes occupy prominent positions within the urban landscape. While much typological work has been completed on Swahili graves and tombs (Wilding 1988; Wilson 1979b), there has been little attention paid to ancient mortuary spaces and practices (Silverman & Small 2002). Again, the ethnographies suggest that these were not simply a backdrop but were active sites of commemorative practice and ritual, seen in the evidence of offerings and sacrifices made at certain important graves (Chami 2002; el-Zein 1974; Middleton 1992). Tombs could also provide the settings for rituals of power negotiation, as at Vumba Kuu where the investiture of the diwan (or sultan) took place at the tomb of a prominent early ruler (Hollis 1900; Wynne-Jones 2010). Cemetery spaces should be included in this discussion because, whether or not they are walled, a collection of graves or tombs defines a particular open urban space. Despite efforts to generalize about the locations of cemeteries (Kusimba 1999a: 151) along the coast, there seem to have been few rules as to where and how cemeteries were arranged or located. Cemetery spaces are found within and outside towns, in clusters and spread over hectares, in the areas north of the Friday mosque, and within the central part of some settlements. Horton’s(1996: 71-6) analysis of the tombs at Shanga serves as the most comprehensive in that it built an argument as to why tombs were located in different parts of the site. At the large, main cemetery northeast of the settlement, he distinguished seven zones and argued that these may represent different clans, drawing on ethnographic analogy from Lamu (el-Zein 1974: 133). These clan areas were believed to be “tangible manifestations of ancestry” with a clan’s “identity, history, and claims to status …partly symbolized in the tombs of its ancestors” (Kusimba 1999b: 330). Additionally, Kusimba (1999a: 151) has suggested that cemetery locations reflect class divisions with society. 182 Afr Archaeol Rev (2012) 29:171–207

Again, these explanations assume that spatial patterning reflects social structure in a fairly straightforward way. This leaves unconsidered the aspect of how places of memory were created either before or after the burials and how these were experienced in the urban landscape. Horton (1996: 75) touches on this aspect, with an alternative explanation for tombs found within particular compounds in the town; these are believed to be markers of ownership and the inalienability of lands associated with them (see also Kusimba 1999b: 330-1). Tombs located singly on the edges of the settlement and grouped at the center of the site north of the mosque were locations where particularly holy men were buried (1996: 76), and thus places that attracted settlement (in the case of tombs on the edges of town). They are also ethnographically known as destinations for regional and coastal pilgrimages (Stigand 1913: 159; Horton 1996: 76; Kusimba 1999b: 331), where offerings are made and supplications proffered. In addition to these, more intentionally enclosed or defined spaces may be added areas that surround congregational mosques and communal wells, the interstices between houses and courtyards, and the spaces of streets and lanes. Street spaces in Swahili towns are rare, with few ancient town plans organized orthogonally; the example of Takwa, with its single main thoroughfare created/maintained by the façades of stonehouses likely dates to the seventeenth century, but is a rare exception (Wilson 1982). All are created through processes of place-making, often including the delineation and bounding of space through enclosure but also in the areas between the “confined” spaces, which might have been intentionally left clear, or associated with very particular understandings and activities. An approach to the full range of spatial practice, inside and outside the buildings of a Swahili town, begins to allow us access to the ways that the ancient Swahili made their place in the world and how they understood and used those settings. Attention to activity, spatial structuring, and the management of access and routes of movement through a site can help us to construct a sense of meaning in this spatial ordering, as we explore the ways that the towns- people understood and moved through these spaces. In this endeavor, the additional information supplied by historical linguistics can be a particularly powerful tool.

Swahili Archaeology and Historical Linguistics

Beyond Correlation: Producing a Future from a Shared Historiography

In seeking creative ways to explore the meanings of space, we began to examine how historical linguistics and archaeology might inform changing spatial conceptions during the emergence of the Swahili world. While this part of our research is only at the formative stage, we were surprised to find so few efforts working between linguistic and archaeological data from Swahili contexts, especially since, in the 1980s, the work of reconstructing the ancient Swahili bound together archaeologists, historical linguists, and historians. The archaeology of key monuments (Chittick 1974, 1984;Horton1996), the reconstruction of KiSwahili’sroots(Nurse& Hinnebusch 1993), and the analysis of oral traditions (Pouwels 1992, 1993; Spear 1984) all provided crucial data necessary to dismantle the colonial thesis of early Swahili society. With the publication of Nurse and Spear’s(1985) The Swahili—a Afr Archaeol Rev (2012) 29:171–207 183 book that brought archaeological materials (through Horton’s then largely unpublished research at Shanga) in direct conversation with linguistic and historical data— there seemed to be hope that the future of the Swahili past would be written between these important disciplines. Unfortunately, that has not been the case. A spate of overviews by archaeologists and ethnographers, published in the late 1990s and early 2000s, barely mentioned linguistic data, and simply reiterated points made by historians (Kusimba 1999a; Horton & Middleton 2000: 26-7; Sinclair & Håkansson 2000; Wright 1993). For example, Horton and Middleton’s(2000: 26) discussion is limited to recognizing the presence of three language groups in East Africa at the beginning of the first millennium AD, suggesting that the Swahili emerged from the Bantu-speaking group. They do not explore the complexities of the linguistic data at all, nor the way that linguistics might aid in the reconstruction of the Swahili past. These overviews sought most of their meaning and nuance in the ethnographic work of Prins (1961, 1971) and Middleton (1992), and data from archaeologists. We see this as a loss, however, since archaeological and linguistic research published in the 1990s offered great potential for a new type of interaction between the fields. For example, Mark Horton’s work at Shanga, documenting in detail the slow evolution of that town from the eighth century AD onward is, in many ways, the archaeological correlate to the linguistic history assembled by Derek Nurse and Thomas Hinnebusch (1993). There are a number of reasons why researchers have been unable to gather the strengths of archaeology and historical linguistics and apply them to reconstructing Swahili pasts. The first is the state of archaeological interpretation in this region, with its continuing interest in origins, chronology, and culture history rather than the social construction and transformation of Swahili society (Wynne-Jones & Fleisher n.d.). A second concern is the way that archaeological data have been deployed in historical linguistic reconstructions and how material culture is thought to be “meaningful.” While linguists find archaeological materials useful, they often characterize them as mute data requiring interpretation by historians (Vansina 1990). The postprocessual turn in archaeology—with its emphasis on context and meaning—is not generally acknowledged nor fully understood in historical linguistics (Blench 2006: 284; but see Schoenbrun 1998: 32), and thus the notion of a social archaeology, with its attendant shift from materials to materiality, has been overlooked.

Chronology and Correlation: Uses of Archaeological and Linguistic Data for the Swahili Past

Much of the effort in correlating archaeological and linguistic data in Africa has been focused on the issue of the Bantu expansions (Blench 2006; Bostoen 2007; de Luna et al. 2012; Eggert 2005; Ehret & Posnansky 1982; Soper 1971). The direct association of linguistic reconstructions with material culture distributions has come under intense scrutiny (Eggert 2005; Hall 1987), and although few would disavow the significant changes that occurred in eastern and southern Africa during the first millennium AD,itisnotclearthatlinguisticandarchaeologicalcorrelationhas provided a better understanding of them. Most criticisms are based on the simplistic way that archaeology and linguistic data have been aligned, using limited archaeological data sets and potentially problematic linguistic tools such as glottochronology 184 Afr Archaeol Rev (2012) 29:171–207

(Eggert 2005). Yet, while we believe that correlation in the name of charting migratory patterns and language dispersals is problematic, we would not go as far as Eggert (2005: 321), who suggests that “archaeologists of Bantu Africa should stick to their material evidence and try to contribute to an ever more closely knitted archaeology of Bantu language territory.” Archaeologists should, we agree, aim for a “more closely knitted archaeology” especially as a way to counter the widely dispersed test-pits that a broad cultural historical approach has produced. However, there is no need to retreat to an archaeological bunker: as more archaeological research focuses on regional projects that produce contextual materials, they offer the possibility of a historical reconstruction in which the association of material and linguistic meanings can be examined. In general, Swahili archaeology has remained separate from discussion of Bantu migrations, due mainly to the fact that its chronology post-dates the supposed expansionary centuries. As such, the East African coastal zone figured only periph- erally in these discussions (e.g.,Ambrose1982:130-2;Soper1982:235)and generally only included discussions of Kwale Ware pottery (see below). This has meant that, since the publication of Nurse and Spear (1985), both archaeology and historical linguistics in coastal East Africa have pursued parallel but generally disconnected research tracks. In the late 1980s and 1990s, researchers in both fields worked toward a chronological reconstruction of coastal languages (Nurse & Hinnebusch 1993) and material culture (Chami 1994, 1998; Horton 1996), aiming to chart out the settlement of the East African coast. However, there are significant challenges to correlating these data, involving the limitations of both archaeological and linguistic data. For the archaeology, this involves the way materials have been collected and interpreted as part of discrete “traditions” and “wares”; for linguistics, the limitations have to do with the Swahili language itself and the aim of the reconstructions. In East African archaeology, attention shifted from understanding the processes of Swahili town development (Chittick 1974; Horton 1996) to focus on Swahili origins (Chami 1994, 1998). Although the linguistic record seemed to settle the issue that KiSwahili was a Bantu language (Nurse & Hinnebusch 1993), the archaeological record spawned intense debates about when and where “the Swahili” emerged (Fleisher & Wynne-Jones 2011). This work began with the assumption that early coastal settlers were Bantu (but see Nkirote 2011), but it made no effort to engage back with linguistic data (but see Chami 2001 and Ehret 2001), or to correlate these data streams. This research was driven by the work of Felix Chami (1994, 1998), who documented first-millennium AD archaeological sites associated with Kwale Ware and early Tana Tradition/TIW pottery on the Tanzanian coast. His research challenged the thesis (Horton 1991; Abungu 1989) that the earliest coastal dwellers, the makers of TIW/Tana Tradition pottery, emerged from areas on the northern Kenyan coast, and that the ceramics derived from Pastoral Neolithic materials (see also Nkirote 2011). Chami’s ceramic research focused more closely on pottery design elements and argued that the evolution of those designs—tracing linkages between Kwale Ware and Tana Tradition pottery—could be found in pottery assemblages on the central Tanzanian coast, assemblages that seemed to pre-date those from the north by a century or more (see also Helm 2000). Chami’s argument is complicated and involves Afr Archaeol Rev (2012) 29:171–207 185

“transitional wares” that purport to connect two seemingly distinct pottery traditions (Chami 1998). Despite the compelling results of this work, there are some concerns about the homogeneity that has been imputed to these wares and the way they have become conflated with cultural traditions (Fleisher & Wynne-Jones 2011). The landmark study of the Swahili language (Nurse & Hinnebusch 1993) details transformations in its phonology, lexis, and morphology. Nurse and Hinnebusch argue that the current dialects of Swahili, broadly categorized into a Northern and Southern dialect (ND, SD), derived from a proto-language, Proto-Swahili (PSW, Table 1). Swahili is one of the Sabaki languages, a set of six related languages spoken on the coast, including Mwani, Elwana, Pokomo, Mijikenda, and Comorian. Nurse and Hinnebusch reconstruct words for Proto-Sabaki (PSA), from which these languages emerged. Sabaki was one of four languages in the Northeast Coast Bantu group, which also includes Seuta, Ruvu, and Pare, and words were reconstructed for the proto-form of this language, Proto-Northeast Coast Bantu (PNEC). This linguistic work did make reference to archaeological materials, using them as support for the proposed chronology and language development. The work, however, was intended to be a linguistic history and not a history of the people that spoke Swahili, and thus did not seek to correlate these datasets in any systematic way. We recognize that there are challenges in working with Swahili historical linguistic material in general and with Nurse and Hinnebusch’s data in particular. For one, despite the fact that Swahili is one of the best-documented Bantu languages, Swahili is relatively challenging for a historical linguist in that it emerges in an area with a high degree of linguistic similarity, thus making detailed word histories difficult. As Nurse and Hinnebusch note (1993: 34):

Multilingual individuals, the linguistic similarity of many of the languages/ dialects, and the geographical adjacency of local communities, would all have provided the general circumstances for local transmission of features. The relatively small size of many communities and the linguistic continuum within the…area would have provided the circumstances for the subsequent fairly rapid and widespread transmission of features.

Additionally, the areal extent of Swahili is represented by many dialects, of which a number of key ones are no longer commonly spoken; this is due to the dominance of the dialect from Zanzibar, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and subsequently Standard Swahili (Nurse & Hinnebusch 1993: 32). These features of the linguistic history mean that there is often not enough phonological change to reconstruct word histories that could be used to both understand past ideas, meanings, or things (and how they changed), especially for the periods related to the development of coastal towns, or even the settlement of the coastal corridor more broadly, from the seventh century onward. Finally, the nature of Nurse and Hinnebusch’s study—a linguistic history—does not necessarily lend itself to detailed historical reconstructions. This is because the words that were reconstructed by them were those that provided insight into the history of the language but do not provide the density of words and ethnographic data that historians normally demand to write social histories (de Luna 2012; de Luna et al. 2012; Schoebrun 1998; Vansina 1990). 186 Afr Archaeol Rev (2012) 29:171–207

Despite the limitations of these datasets, a number of historians have attempted to correlate archaeological and linguistic data to describe the outlines of early coastal history. Thomas Spear’s(2000) overview is the most comprehensive and envisions a close connection between coastal ceramic traditions and protolanguages (see also Nurse 1997: 379): …the development of the Tana/TIW tradition between the fourth-eighth centuries would have occurred simultaneously with the slow differentiation of NEC into Sabaki, Pare, Seuta, and Ruvu. Local cultural differences remained minor during this stage, however, as both the Tana/TIW tradition and the NEC languages remained remarkably homogenous. More recently, Gonzalez (2009: 51-8) has attempted a more fine-grained correlation between linguistics and archaeology in “hinter-coastal Tanzania.” Working with Chami’s ceramic typologies (1994, 1998), she claims (2009: 56) to correlate the subtle ceramic distinctions constructed by him with linguistic reconstructions, arguing, “ethno-linguistically distinct but closely related Bantu-speaking people preceded the emergence of proto-Northeast-Coast Bantu speakers in Tanzania.” The problems with this type of reconstruction are legion. Most crucially, it relies on a problematic assumption that ceramic styles are related to language use. However, in an effort to make Chami’s work directly comparable with linguistics, it problematically glosses issues of chronology and sample size. One of our concerns with how ceramic and linguistic data have been made to “fit” each other stems from the way that ceramic traditions have come to be accepted as holistic and homogenous by archaeologists, historians, and linguists. For example, the notion that Tana Tradition/TIW pottery is “remarkably homogenous” (Spear 2000: 272) is far from an archaeological fact. It is also a result of the classificatory process and the way that ceramic analysis has proceeded in East Africa. While there is no doubt that these ceramics from far-flung places share some characteristics, the degree of homogeneity has been overstated (Wynne-Jones & Fleisher 2011) and obscures variability in the form, style, and use of coastal pottery. As Robertshaw (2012) notes, work on contextualizing pottery has already begun in the Great Lakes region; Ashley’s(2010) plea for a “socialized archaeology of ceramics” argues for shifting our focus from ceramics as chronological tools to functional ones. On the Swahili coast itself, research by the authors has stressed the active role of material culture in both the constitution of power (Fleisher 2010b) and the construction and maintenance of identity (Wynne-Jones 2007b).

Toward a More Social Approach

With most of the emphasis on origins, the interplay between archaeology and linguistics has thus become mostly about “when” and “where,” and has, we think, left much of the great interpretive potential of both fields under-exploited, avoiding “why” and “how” questions (Robertshaw 2012; de Luna et al. 2012). We believe that there is much to be learned from a more social approach to both linguistic and archaeological data, and a rethinking of the relationship between the two fields. There are signs that the time is right for such changes: A number of historians have Afr Archaeol Rev (2012) 29:171–207 187 begun to write social histories with historical linguistic data; archaeologists, with a turn toward materiality and contextual approaches, have similarly begun to think beyond culture history and chronology. The 1990s was a period when historical linguists in Africa began to write historical reconstructions, rather than simply language histories, through the “words and things” approach (de Luna 2012; de Luna et al. 2012; Schoenbrun 1998; Vansina 1990). This approach uses a comparative method, working between ethnographic and historical documents, reconstructions of word histories, and, where available, archaeological data, to explore past social contexts. In this way, historians are able to associate “ideas and things …in practice” as well as the “distributions and meanings for each one of those associated ideas and things” (Schoenbrun 1998: 266). Rather than simply charting the spread of languages and the movement of particular diets and technology, historians are now using historical linguistics to write social histories on topics such as the development of political traditions (Vansina 1990), gender and health (Schoenbrun 1998), and emotions (de Luna 2011). The post-processual turn has similarly led to a more social archaeology (Meskell and Preucel 2004) in which the production and use of material culture and spatial practices are understood as meaningful acts, fundamental to not just the continuance of social life, but its production and reproduction (Ashmore 2002). The burgeoning field of materiality and material culture studies cannot be adequately summarized here (see Meskell 2004;Miller2005;Olsen2010). The concept of materiality suggests that objects and settings were active and had a social role rather than simply reflecting social truths. It rests on the notion of context and the ways that spaces and things were used and experienced in the past. A related concept is the recognition of the social role of goods and their implication in situated practices. Rather than reflections of a prior social order, objects are produced, used, and acquired through a series of processes in which the objects themselves are active participants and affect the social situation in which they are involved. The case of ceramics is particularly important, as these are the backbone of archaeological reconstruction. They are also the primary category of data used outside archaeology to represent particular groups. Instead of thinking of ceramics only as chronological or cultural markers, we need to understand instead their production, use, and discard as part of the constitution and reproduction of culture itself. Thus, in both history/historical linguistics and archaeology, changes are afoot that may provide an important meeting ground in which more complex social histories may be written. For this to happen, however, archaeologists will need to understand how historians use historical linguistics to write social histories (de Luna et al. 2012; Ehret 2012; Vansina 2009) and how they differ from the linguistic histories mostly commonly associated with research on the Bantu expansions. It also requires an understanding of the limitations of some linguistic studies, as described for Swahili above. Historians will need to recognize the way materiality and context are crucial in incorporating the insights of archaeology into social histories. Too often, archaeology is called upon only to provide chronology or material evidence for historical linguistic meanings, making it the passive voice in interdisciplinary reconstructions (Vansina 1990: 11), rather than a field through which past meanings may be reconstructed. The “meaning” that we emphasize in this paper, and that we think will find resonance in the work of historians that utilize historical linguistics, is that constituted in social 188 Afr Archaeol Rev (2012) 29:171–207 action. Archaeological studies of meanings have emphasized many things, including the functional meanings of objects and the meanings of symbolic representation and iconography (Gillespie 2002). While the latter approach assumes that the meaning of material objects (as symbols) can be understood directly (as representations of status or gender, for example), the former approaches were content to explore what a particular object was meant to do. The meaning found in social action differs from these approaches, in that it is not necessarily fixed in a particular symbol or function; rather, meaning emerges through the daily activities of people, interacting with others or themselves, as they engage with material culture. Research that sees objects and places as illustration, without the associated meaning given by practice, might help to address basic questions of the origin and dispersal of ceramic styles (and possibly language), yet it does little to help us think about, for example, how Swahili people conceptualized the broad-scale changes that occurred along the coastal corridor during the period from AD 600–1500. Thus, both fields have the potential to do that. Through “words-and-things,” historical linguists can “provide direct evidence for activities and institutions in the past, but…also determine which words and meanings are inherited …[and] which [are] inherited but with their meaning changed” (Nurse 1997: 381). Similarly, archaeologists, armed with a greater understanding of materiality, can explore the changing meaning of social spaces, material goods, ideas, and identities, as constituted in practice (Fleisher 2010b;Wynne-Jones2007a, b). In the following section, we attempt to bring together the potential we see for combined understandings, or at least for finding meaning and practice in material patterning that allows the disciplines to engage in a dialogue between equals.

Spatial Concepts, Archaeology, and Lexical Innovations

We turn now to a somewhat experimental and necessarily preliminary examination of where there might be some bridges between linguistic and archaeological data. We believe that the bridge we have chosen—spatial practice—provides a potentially rich way to work between these datasets, to move beyond wholesale correlation (which is itself a bridging exercise, based on a reified notion of “culture”). A focus on spatial practice—as advocated here—allows an appreciation of the ways that the built and natural environment was understood in the past. It builds on the notion that places, or social spaces, are produced continuously by the practices associated with them (Lefebvre 1991). Spatial archaeologies have explored the ways that the setting reflects and produces social relationships, such as through the control of space that might be linked to power, or in the reproduction of particular cosmological principles (Ashmore 1989, 1991). In the Swahili context, this allows us to explore how the townscapes were made into “places” or social spaces through the activities occurring within them. Exploring these archaeologically builds on the material associations of space and requires an understanding of the nature of archaeological deposition, in which materials are not simply laid down chronologically but tied to the human routines and performances through which social life is enacted (Stahl 2001). As J. Pollard (2008: 43; see also Stahl 2008) notes, “the routine disposal of refuse—like speech, burial, and the organization of domestic space—reproduces the symbolic Afr Archaeol Rev (2012) 29:171–207 189 categories that constitute culture.” The spaces of the town are therefore produced through their associated practice, a practice that can be explored archaeologically to bring nuance and diversity to broad-brush reconstructions, as well as through the reconstructed words related to spatial practice. Our ability to work with linguistic data is admittedly restricted; we draw only on the lexical innovations that have been reconstructed for particular periods. Nurse and Hinnebusch’s(1993) volume is particularly useful in this regard, since in it they offer lists of innovations for the proto-languages they reconstruct for the language history of Swahili. We approached the lexical innovations that Nurse and Hinnebusch (1993) document for these proto-languages, thinking about our own research questions on space and spatial practice in the Swahili world, drawing out innovations that may speak to these issues (Table 2). Because we are not able to reconstruct earlier meanings, or “word histories,” for these innovations, we can only suggest ways that the innovations might resonate with the material record of the periods in which they emerged. We recognize that these do not represent a full corpus of what was innovated during this period; they are simply the words that Nurse and Hinnebusch (1993) reconstructed in the course of writing their linguistic history of Swahili, one of the limitations of working with published materials discussed above. Therefore, what follows is not an historical reconstructionusingthewords-and-thingsapproach (Gonzalez 2009; Schoenbrun 1998; Vansina 1990) but rather is an attempt to work with published historical linguistic data and to show how it may or may not resonate with archaeological data. We hope to explore ways that both archaeological and linguistic data can point to historical meanings, beyond chronology and correlation.1 We discuss three areas of resonance between linguistic innovations and the archaeological data we have been recovering at Songo Mnara in southern Tanzania. These include: ways of bounding and defining space; commemoration and what might be called the creation and maintenance of ancestors; and the activities of the house, yard, and public space. In each of these areas, we show how, by locating material culture in context, we are able to document a range of depositional acts, from the routinized activities of daily life in town to the more structured or performative deposits related to ritual, political, or economic concerns. When excavations reveal archaeological data representing routine practices, we can seek meaning through linguistic innovations (and one day, through reconstructions); these examples leave intact the traditional relationship between historical linguistic and archaeological data yet expand the ways that archaeology might contribute to that dialogue. However, archaeological data from Songo Mnara also provide evidence of active attempts to transform spaces into places, through intentional and performative acts. It is in these contexts—in houses and cemeteries—where archaeology can offer historical meanings that could go beyond those available through historical linguistic reconstructions. Songo Mnara can be thought of as a model settlement in the increasingly bounded Swahili world of the second millennium AD (Fig. 4). Its complex and impressive buildings and spaces are regarded by many as the archetype of classic Swahili architecture (Garlake 1966, 2002; Wynne-Jones & Fleisher 2010). The site offers a unique opportunity to investigate both confined and delimited space, as it contains

1 Many of the ideas discussed in this section come from fruitful conversations with Kathryn de Luna, but she should not be held accountable for the content herein. 190 Afr Archaeol Rev (2012) 29:171–207

Table 2 Lexical innovations related to space and spatial practice, grouped by category (from Nurse & Hinnebusch 1993)

Agriculture PSA *-palil- “clean, weed” CD *-pad- “scrape” PSA *lucaga 11 “raised grain store” PSA *lucelo 11 “winnowing tray” *Wucelu 14 “cleared ground”, SD uceo MK utseru, CB *-cèd-, *-céd- “clean” PSW *mukoko 3 “mangrove” mkooko (Mw), mkoko (ND, SD,MK) see PSA *įkoko “crust” PSW *(į)šamba 5 “cultivated area” °Com, °Mn, ?French champ, if so then post-PSW ND hoţi9“cattle pen” hooţi (Mw), EC: oot (So. Som) SD uteo 11 “winnowing tray” (ucheo) ND *uţeo, PSA *lucelo Spatial activities PSA *-zyol- “sweep up” PSW *-ondol- “clear away”, -oodola (Mw), *-ondok- “go out” -ondoka (ND, SD), -ondoa (ND, SD, Nz), -ondoha (Nz) ND -gura “migrate” -guura (Mw), EC: guur (St. Som) SD -hama (čama “migrate” MK °-tsama, etc., nB (Ruvu) Spaces and places PSA *isimo 5 “hole”, ?PSC *sim- “dig” but note in Chaga, Sonjo; PSA *kisima “well” < CB PSA *nguzo 9 “pillar, post”, Taita PSA *luWanda 11 “large open area”, CK, etc PSA *lwangwa 11 “bare area” PSW *mufųlo 3 “ditch” °mfuo (MK), PSA *-fųl- “wash” PSW *įjukwala 5 “platform” ukwaa/ikwaa (ND), jukwaa, jukwar (SD) “platform” PSW *įWombwe 5 “cliff” ?CB *-bòmbò “forehead”, ombe (Am), ombwe “cliff, edge, brink” (Ung) PSW *ŋambo 9 “on other side of” Similar in Com, MK ND kiungu “house of more than one story” Mw čiłuungu 7 ND marara “undergrowth, bush”

one of the most dramatic investments in domestic architecture and town planning on the coast. The settlement can be imagined as a series of nested bounded spaces, starting at the town wall which bounds houses, large public spaces, and alleys which in turn bound interior courts, courtyards, walled cemeteries and tombs. We are investigating the activities associatedwithallthesespacesandhavebegunto decipher what people were doing across the site (Fleisher & Wynne-Jones 2010). Afr Archaeol Rev (2012) 29:171–207 191

Fig. 4 Songo Mnara site plan, open areas, mosques, and cemeteries noted

The site sits on the northwestern tip of a small island in the Kilwa archipelago. To the north, on its own island, is Kilwa Kisiwani, one of the most famous of all Swahili towns. Kilwa emerged as one of the most powerful settlements on the Eastern African coast, ruled by sultans who managed the intercontinental trade between the interior of Africa and the Indian Ocean world (Sutton 1998). Kilwa appears to have been occupied from at least the eighth century AD (Chittick 1974), with earlier occupation on the island extending back deeper into the past (Chami 2006). In contrast, Songo Mnara was built and occupied from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. The emergence of Songo Mnara, therefore, follows the success of Kilwa and may be seen as an extension of the monumental construction that took place on Kilwa beginning in the twelfth century AD. However, Songo Mnara is distinguished from Kilwa by its clear and unadulterated town plan; although Kilwa contains numerous important and impressive monuments, its overall town plan is still poorly understood (Fleisher et al. 2012).

Bounding and Defining Space

Most of the spatial lexical innovations in Nurse and Hinnebusch (1993) relate to concepts that emerged in PSA and PSW (see Table 1) and refer to agricultural spaces (fields or storage), defense, spatial activities, or general spaces/places (Table 2). Not surprisingly, many of the spatial innovations for PSA are related to agriculture and the clearing or cleaning of spaces, as well as innovations that describe open and bare spaces. As coastal dwellers moved into new areas, the opening up of space through the clearing of forest and brush to make new gardens and agricultural land was likely 192 Afr Archaeol Rev (2012) 29:171–207 a common part of daily of life. Other words, such as *(į)šamba (“cultivated area”) lends a sense of place in contrast to the more general descriptive terms that PSA has to offer (*luWanda, “large open area”; *lwangwa, “bare area”). Two innovations in this period also seem to describe coastalorislandedges,includingwordsfor mangrove2 and the word for cliff (related to “edge, brink”). For PSW, there are fewer innovations related to agriculture, but a number of the innovated spatial words are related to acts or places that serve to bound or provide greater definition to spaces. For example, the possible loan word *iboma (“defended area”) is a PSW innovation, suggestive perhaps of growing inter-community tensions. This term, loaned in the relatively short period during the development of PSW, seems to pre-date the construction of town walls in coral rag. However, a later innovation in ND, *(i)duru, meaning “stockade” might be more contemporaneous with the significant numbers of towns on the northern coast that are walled. It is not clear if the term stockade is more of a reference to wood-constructed walls, but it provides some evidence of the continuing need to defend and protect settlements, perhaps in new ways during the period when ND was emerging. This again provides a hypothesis, whether town walls—the ruins of which are often of coral rag—were once constructed of less permanent materials, something that has not been examined archaeologically. It also begs the question as to whether sites without coral rag walls might simply have had less permanent ones. Songo Mnara is one of the many settlements that did have a permanent town wall that bounded the site and apparently controlled access to it. The widespread construction of walls in the thirteenth–fifteenth centuries (Horton & Middleton 2000: 125) has led some to argue that this period was one of heightened concern for defense (Pradines 2004), perhaps from other towns or neighboring non-Swahili people (Freeman-Grenville 1962). At many sites, the walls themselves would not have been sufficient for this purpose and may have been more concerned with providing a sense of security for visiting merchants. In this way, the walls provided a demarcation between spaces of Islam and purity and those beyond which would have been regarded as dangerous and wild. The fact that the term *iboma is borrowed into PSW before the construction of permanent walls suggests that these interpretations might not be mutually exclusive. Some Swahili town walls may have been later additions, enclosing an earlier settlement, although Horton (1994) claims that the earliest coastal settlements may have been walled themselves, with access controlled through gates. Songo Mnara’s town wall is somewhat unique, in that parts of it are purpose-built, as in the sections to the north and west, but parts are coincident with the outer walls of houses as along the southern and eastern sides (Fig. 4). Because there is no clear gate on the extant town wall at Songo Mnara, it has been challenging to decipher access points. We now believe that the wall was uninterrupted on the northern, eastern, and southern sides but contained an open, “gate” area on the western edge, between two small mosques that flanked the wall (Fig. 5). This western edge of the site was adjacent to a beach, through which boats accessed the town, although today, a dense mangrove stand obscures this access route. In ND and SD, the spatial lexical innovations include specific features of an increasingly bounded spatial landscape: house of more than one story, stockade,

2 This word has a related or earlier meaning of ‘crust.’ Afr Archaeol Rev (2012) 29:171–207 193

Fig. 5 Distribution of daub in test pits at Songo Mnara, defining the edges of a possible “public space” shed, cattle pen. Another avenue to explore changing meanings of spatial terms would be to trace the relationship between reconstructions like (“large open area”), a PSA innovation, to contemporary attestations. This would allow us to explore how the spatial terms developed in approximately the sixth century (like *luWanda) were altered through time such that a range of related words/meanings now exist. These contemporary words include kiwanda,meaning“plot of ground for working, a workshop,” a term that Kusimba (1999a) also applies to a courtyard in Swahili houses. In current usage, this word also seems to have taken on the meaning of factory or workplace. Others include kiwanja, which is “a place or ground for some activity,” such as building, dancing, or playing and uwanda (“an open space”), which is used in towns for “public square” or the “space before houses.” If possible, to reconstruct the word histories for these attestations, they may provide insight into how meanings and uses of urban spaces changed through time. For example, the contemporary attestation kiwanda includes the sense of an open space but also the fact that it was a place of work. As applied to house compounds, this word provides a hypothesis about the relationship between these spaces and the work carried out within them and one that is beginning to be addressed at Songo Mnara archaeologically. Through architecture, geophysics, and archaeological remains, we have also begun to piece together the various types of open spaces at Songo Mnara, akin to the fuzzy lines between the contemporary Swahili terms kiwanda, kiwanja, and uwanda. These include areas that are partially delimited by the exterior walls of houses and the town wall, forming what might be called courtyards. In one courtyard area along the northern town wall (Fig. 4), 13 by 22 m in size, we found artifacts related to production, including spindle whorls, clustered at the edges of the space. In the 194 Afr Archaeol Rev (2012) 29:171–207 center, however, we uncovered a large concentration of debris indicating the production of lime plaster. This might have been associated with the initial construction of the houses, but notably the fill that overlaid this debris had a much lower density of artifacts compared with areas at the margins, suggesting that the central area was kept clear, while activities clustered at the margins. We have also located what was likely a protected or maintained public space along the western edge of the settlement. Today, the area is simply flat, open, and grassy, but geophysical testing revealed a series of anomalies that border a rectangular zone, approximately 30 by 55 m in size (Fig. 5). We now know that some of these anomalies are the remains of earth-and-thatch houses, on the northern and southern edges of the space; archaeological testing in the area revealed concentrations of daub and other domestic artifacts closely associated with the anomalies (Fig. 5). The space itself, however, contains few geophysical anomalies and a comparatively low artifact density, suggesting an area that was protected from human activities that would have disturbed the ground. This open area was probably where people first entered the settlement, as it lies adjacent to the likely entrance point to the town. Notably, it is the relative lack of archaeological signatures and materials in this area that indicates the intentional practices of the town’s inhabitants; these are the practices of defining, protecting, and maintaining a place, without recourse to permanent boundary markers like coral walls. Although future large-exposure excavations in this area will explore this space and the houses that surrounded it more thoroughly, it is already clear that several different types of space are evident in this western area of Songo Mnara, including activity areas, dwelling places, and deliberately maintained open space. This speaks to the distinction between uwanda, kiwanja, and kiwanda, suggesting that the proliferation of words is more than a chronological narrowing of definition and is instead suggestive of distinct types of space that can be recognized in the Swahili world.

Commemoration and the Ancestors

Lexical innovations in SD include many terms that name older people in society, either descriptively or with particular values attached to them. This includes the words saha (“local chief/rich person”), mjuzi (“wise person”), baba (“father”), babu (“grandfather”), kaka (“elder brother”), and mzee (“old person”). Some of these words were likely the result of borrowing (e.g., babu, from Persian). The word mzee is related to another innovation, that of the verb –zaa, “give birth” or “to beget.” In these words, we can see a density of terminology that distinguishes older from younger and emphasizes elders who are respected and venerated. The term mzee is today one that accords respect to an elder and is not simply a description of an old person. That mzee is related to the verb –zaa might suggest a connection between the honor that an older person achieves and their descendants that follow. The increase in these words might be linked to the influence of Islamic practice, as this period witnessed an increased number of borrowed words from Arabic. Such innovations may suggest a growing concern with issues of ancestry and inheritance, as differentials in wealth became increasingly pronounced during the thirteenth–fifteenth centuries AD.Themaintenanceofstatusthroughappealsto ancestry is known from certain coastal chronicles, most notably the Kilwa Chronicle Afr Archaeol Rev (2012) 29:171–207 195 which was first recorded by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century (Freeman-Grenville 1962). The material form of Swahili towns reflects these distinctions; the permanence of houses of coral rag served as a striking contrast with earth-and-thatch ones. Allen (1979: 5) argued that the Swahili stonehouse “embodied, in its permanence and within its thick solid walls, [its owners’]culturalacquisitionsandthoseofhis ancestors before him,” and it is clear that during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries many material practices were not simply the functional transformation from one style to another but rather active efforts to materialize status. This may be most readily seen, beginning in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in the construction of coral- rag tombs, tomb enclosures, and headstone/footstone markers (Horton 1996; Wilding 1988; Wilson 1979b). In contemporary periods, the burials of town leaders and holy men were marked with tombs, the latter of which often served as the destinations for coastal pilgrimages (Horton & Middleton 2000: 124). These places thus served not simply to mark important people, but as active sites of their ongoing commemoration, through which descendents might claim authority and blessing. Cemeteries and tombs are visible parts of ancient Swahili towns, often located on the edges of town, outside the stone walls, as at Shanga and Kilwa, or in the area north of the Friday mosque. Songo Mnara contains four cemeteries, including one in the central open area, a small one associated with the main mosque, and two outside the town walls (Fig. 4). Far from being tucked away, the cemetery in the central open space at Songo Mnara was situated to be seen and observed. The most monumental houses at the site define the southern edge of this open space and are built on a coral outcrop such that the houses are raised above the rest of the settlement. At least four large staircases lead from the houses into this open area, each providing a full vista of the area itself. Geoarchaeological data indicate that the vegetation in this area was likely covered in grasses and was distinguishable from the northern open area which contained more evidence of woody plants (Sulas & Madella 2012). This suggests that the central zone with its numerous graves and tombs was kept clearer than others. Thus, burial practice is crucial to an understanding of Songo Mnara, in terms of its urban plan but also in the daily life of the town. Excavations in and around these burials and tombs are providing evidence of the material practices of death, burial, and commemoration. While burial itself followed a regular procedure with bodies evidently bound with cloth, the variable ways that burials were marked after burial— some not at all, some with head and foot stones, and some with walled tombs— indicate a rich set of memory practices, depending possibly on the position of the person at death, or the ability of families to position the memory of the dead in strategic ways. We have found that tomb walls were almost always constructed long after the individual had been buried, often missing the exact site of the burial itself. The first limited excavations of burials at Songo Mnara have also revealed a striking number of infants buried within the tombs and walled cemeteries (Robson Brown & Migliaccio 2012). The presence of infants in these contexts may suggest that status was inherited at Songo Mnara, providing insight into way powerful families sought to retain authority in town. The archaeology of the space around the tombs also suggests a set of practices that were part of the continuing practices of commemoration. Excavations in the area around a stepped coral rag tomb were aimed at examining whether archaeologically detectable practices were associated with the tombs. This tomb had indications of 196 Afr Archaeol Rev (2012) 29:171–207 offering niches on the eastern and western sides (Fig. 6) and the remains of what appeared to be ceramic vessels placed as offerings at the surface. The excavated deposits represent the built-up fill around the tomb, which itself rested on subsoil. The finds from these trenches include materials associated with ritual offerings: quantities of local and imported pottery, copper coins, and, perhaps most strikingly, close to 6,000 rounded quartz pebbles (Fig. 7). There are ethnographic and historical analogs for these offerings: coins are left on tombstones and quartz pebbles scattered among the headstones in another cemetery at Songo Mnara in contemporary offerings. These offerings were described by Burton (1872: 359) when he visited the site in the late nineteenth century as an “ancient custom …[in which] small stones are washed, perfumed and sundried…finally, they are strewed with prayers upon the tomb.” Local and imported ceramics might also be evidence of food left at the tomb, or feasts carried out in their vicinity, both ethnographically known practices (Fleisher 2010b). Geochemical samples taken from the excavated deposits at the tomb suggest there was an abundance of burned plant material, indicative perhaps of food offerings or incense. Additionally, phytolith evidence from these excavations may hint at particular burial practices: In the fill surrounding the headstones north and south of the tomb, there were very high levels of palm phytoliths, which were completely absent on the eastern side of the tomb and lower levels. This may indicate the use of palm fronds to demarcate these burials, or as parts of other ritual activities associated with the tomb. Thus, the prominence afforded to burials within the town, the burial of children in prominent tombs, and the practices recovered through archaeology by which these spaces became places of commemoration suggest the growing importance of ancestry that is highlighted by the lexicon. Furthermore, archaeology is beginning to demonstrate how this was incorporated into the daily life of the town and how, through spatial practice and the ongoing use and deposition at the sites of ancestors, these

Fig. 6 Stepped tomb and excavations in surrounding area, Songo Mnara Afr Archaeol Rev (2012) 29:171–207 197

Fig. 7 Quartzite offering stones developing concepts might have been inscribed in the urban landscape in important ways.

Houses, Domestic Activities, and Structured Deposits

There are few lexical innovations related to houses themselves, except for the ND innovation of kiungu (houses of more than one story). This innovation suggests the growing differentiation between stone and earth-and-thatch houses, a distinction that is in evidence at Songo Mnara. Songo Mnara contained one- and two-story buildings, as well as earth-and-thatch structures adjacent to some of the most monumental buildings at the site. We have begun excavating in some of the more than 40 houses at Songo Mnara, and this has provided data that inform us about the routine practices of domestic life, as well as more intentional acts of deposition. Excavations within the houses have revealed the household production of cotton thread through concentrations of spindle whorls in particular rooms and the processing of crops in the interior spaces, through the presence of phytoliths and palae- obotanical remains. One striking example of the patterning of daily practices is the consistent deposition of refuse to the west of doorways that we found in a fully excavated house (House 44; Figs. 4 and 8). Such deposits provide a contrast to ethnoarchaeological models that attempt to establish meanings for particular rooms and consistent relationships between particular spaces and daily activities, suggesting that activities were distributed in a more complex pattern within the house. For example, the back room of houses, known ethnographically as the most ritually significant and protected space (Donley-Reid 1987), has been the setting at Songo Mnara of some of most mundane productive activities—cooking, small-scale production, and crop processing. Other domestic spaces at Songo Mnara are more 198 Afr Archaeol Rev (2012) 29:171–207

Fig. 8 House 44 and room deposits curious, such as the dozens of stepped courts found at the site, with one or two found in most houses. We found few archaeological materials in these spaces, which may have been kept clean and served as more “public” areas within the house. This is supported by their highly decorated nature and the numbers of ornamental niches found in these areas. Archaeological investigations of houses at Songo Mnara thus allow us to challenge the monolithic meanings that have been constructed for the Swahili house (Allen 1979;Donley-Reid1987)andbegintoexamineregional Afr Archaeol Rev (2012) 29:171–207 199 variations in the way people negotiated and managed domestic space. Houses at this southern Swahili town are dramatically different than the archetypical “Swahili house,” with its intimacy gradient moving from front to back. The archaeological data have also revealed that such activities were not carried out in the houses only. Through geophysical surveys and test excavations, we have found dense middens of household debris just outside the house walls, suggesting that domestic activity extended beyond the “confined” spaces and into the delimited areas around the walls. Excavations within houses have also revealed two intentional deposits, caches of items buried below the floor of rooms in the back of houses. The first contained a hoard of over 300 Kilwa-type copper coins, with a string of carnelian beads; the second included eight large aragonite (clam shell) beads or spindle whorls (Fig. 9). Each deposit was located in the northwest corner of the room, buried permanently below a coral rag-and-plaster floor. While the coin hoard might be thought of as a means to protect valuable goods, the buried beads offer the possibility that these deposits had meanings beyond their intrinsic value. Donley-Reid (1987) has documented the way buried deposits in the back rooms of houses were parts of ritual acts,

Fig. 9 Artifacts from buried deposits in houses: carnelian beads (top) and aragonite (giant clam) spindle whorls/beads (bottom) 200 Afr Archaeol Rev (2012) 29:171–207 but examples include infant burials and sacrificial animals. The deposits at Songo Mnara might be an early form of these practices, but the materials themselves suggest quite different meanings than her eighteenth–nineteenth-century practices. Wynne- Jones and Fleisher (2012) have argued that coins were involved in numerous regimes of value, beyond their intrinsic monetary worth; similarly, Middleton (2003) has argued that certain coins may have been heirlooms or objects of esteem. The common occurrence of coins in deposits across the site seems to argue against the necessity of hoarding coins for their direct value, suggesting that depositional act may have been as important as the materials themselves, what archaeologists have called “structured deposits” (Pollard 2008; Richards & Thomas 1984; Thomas 1999). This is supported by the comparable deposit of beads/spindle whorls which might not be thought of so readily as a “hoard,” but clearly held value and the capacity to perform the same social function in this context. Archaeology of the houses of Songo Mnara thus moves our understandings of place-making beyond the meanings available through lexical innovation alone. The words can allow us to glimpse a period of increasingly defined structural worlds, as houses and the spaces between houses were refined to specific purpose. Archaeology sensitive to context within the walls of these houses can supplement this with an appreciation of how these houses were made into places; the activities occurring in different rooms as the occupants went about their daily round; the places set aside and perhaps used for guests and for purposes of hospitality; and the ritualized practices that might have defined those places, “founding” them through buried deposits that inscribed those spaces with meaning. We also get a much clearer sense of public and private, which would not be possible with the linguistics alone, the latter speaking only to increasingly bounded lives. Instead, the exterior walls of Songo Mnara’s houses suggest an overspill of domestic activity, as certain practices were confined, and others simply delimited, by this changing architectural setting.

Conclusion

This paper has explored the potential for a renewed engagement between archaeology and historical linguistics, with an emphasis on meaning and spatial practice. In an effort to move beyond correlation (the one-to-one linkage of protolanguages and ceramic types in the service of cultural historical reconstructions), we have looked toward recent social histories by historians utilizing historical linguistics, and archaeological studies that emphasize materiality, context, and social practice. Researchers in both of these fields have recognized the importance of understanding “ideas and things…in practice” (Schoenbrun 1998: 266), a mutual recognition that allows for an exciting common ground. We have highlighted the way material culture can serve as more than a means to chronology, a simple reflection of cultural groups, or material evidence for historical linguistic meanings. Objects are produced, used, and acquired through a series of processes in which the objects themselves are active participants and affect the social situation in which they are involved. Similarly, word histories and reconstructions can be used to explore how the meaning of ideas and things changed through time and how they were related to other ideas and things at different moments in the past. Afr Archaeol Rev (2012) 29:171–207 201

The early history of the Swahili coast offers a unique case to explore this renewed engagement, with its relatively robust material assemblage and well-documented linguistic history. In reviewing what is known about the spatial parameters of Swahili towns, we have emphasized the importance of spatial practice and how archaeological approaches to it can open up new interpretative possibilities for precolonial coastal history. This will require us to move beyond the traditional emphasis on houses and mosques, while never overlooking their important role in the urban fabric. A similar review of the published innovations of spatial terminology alerts us to the limitations of using a linguistic history (e.g., Nurse & Hinnebusch 1993) to glean historical meanings, as well as the issues inherent in the Swahili language itself. These insights alone are an important step in finding a way forward for archaeology and historical linguistics: Archaeologists need to learn more about how historians use historical linguistics and ethnography (de Luna et al. 2012), how the reconstruction process works (Ehret 2012), and what is and what is not possible through historical linguistic reconstructions. The tentative and preliminary steps taken here to work between archaeological and linguistic data are not meant to be conclusive but rather indicative of the type of questions and issues that might be successfully broached. With archaeological data from Songo Mnara and published linguistic innovations, we have: explored the development of complex spatial organization within the urban milieu and how distinctions between urban space were created and maintained; charted the emergence of linguistic innovations and material practices that indicate the growing importance of ancestry and public commemoration; challenged the historicization of ethnographic models, and how they have been applied to precolonial contexts; and highlighted the importance of depositional practice, and the way it can serve as a form of place-making. In the construction of the urban settlement of Songo Mnara, there was a solidifi- cation or concretization of open space, through acts of bounding that included the construction of town walls, earthen houses, and cemeteries, as well as the protection and maintenance of certain public areas. Although word histories for this spatial complexity are not yet available, contemporary attestations hint at the possibility that historical linguistics could help explore the meaning of the structural complexity of Swahili urban space. Contemporary attestations suggest that different places may have hosted different kinds of daily and special acts: public squares for public events, spaces for playing and dancing, and work/production spaces. When did specialized terms for particular parts of urban space emerge, and what were the innovations that were used for them? Were they borrowed from terms used in the Islamic world, as spatial concepts from other Islamic cities were deployed on the East African coast, or were they derived from local ideas of spatial practice in the settlements that preceded them? In the excavations at Shanga, the evidence seems to suggest an evolution of architecture and spatial arrangement that developed in situ, building on older forms or spatial organization and house structure, but this is just one example. The archaeology of Songo Mnara alerts us to the development of public forms of commemoration, through the central placement of cemeteries and tombs, the recur- ring placement of offerings on certain graves, and the post hoc construction of tombs. These memory practices could be read as symbolic actions that sought to solidify 202 Afr Archaeol Rev (2012) 29:171–207 power and prestige. However, the innovation of a number of new words for elders and people with status in southern dialects suggests a growing emphasis on ideas of ancestry and status; it may be, therefore, that material practices (like the construction of tombs or graveside offerings) were not simply confirming or representing power but were in fact crucial to the formulation and shaping of it. In this example, there is no “correlation” between particular words and their archaeological (material) corre- lates but rather the development of a wider set of terms, practices, and objects that speak to the growing importance of ancestors, memory, and status. As shown, acts of defining, creating, and inhabiting space are key parts of the Swahili lexicon; the exploration of chronology for these concepts can offer an important means of historicizing spatial models which are currently heavily dependent on contemporary, ethnographic examples. By working between linguist innovations and archaeological data, we can begin to historicize Swahili spatial models and challenge the application of ethnographic models to hundreds of years of historical development. In the example of the Swahili house, we have shown the limits of ethnographic models, and this possibility that archaeological data can reveal the social practices of houses at a particular time and place, practices that define notions of public and private, the organization of domestic production, and means toward place-making. This final point highlights how acts of deposition are associated with forms of practice, whether the routine practices of the house and yard, the private deposits in the back rooms of houses, or the intentional and performative ritual acts at the tombs of ancestors. As each of these directions shows, there is no singular, easy path for working between archaeology and linguistic data. And yet, each charts a way for archaeological data to be understood as meaningfully constituted, on par with the meanings that can be reconstructed through the histories of words. In all these cases, we hope to have sketched a future in which archaeologists and historical linguists, collaborating to tackle common issues, can bring the interpretative potential of linguistic histories and archaeological contexts to bear on the Swahili past.

Acknowledgments Research at Songo Mnara is funded by the National Science Foundation (USA, BCS 1123091), the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK, AH/J502716/1), the Rice University Archae- ological Field School, and the Social Sciences Research Institute at Rice. The project is carried out in collaboration with the Antiquities Division, Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism, Tanzania; in particular, we thank Mr. Donatius Kamamba, Director of Antiquities, and Mr. Revocatus Bugumba of the Kilwa office. Thanks are due to the many specialists who have worked to collect and interpret such compelling data: Federica Sulas, Kate Welham, Kate Robson Brown, Harry Manley, Charlene Steele, Francesca Migliaccio, and Prof. Heinz Rüther and the Zamani Project. Thanks also go to the students on the field schools that assisted with testing and excavations in 2009 and in 2011. Finally, thanks to Patrick Wynne-Jones who translated the abstract into French. The paper benefitted immensely from two anonymous reviewers as well as close readings and comments by Kate de Luna, David Schoenbrun, and Adria LaViolette.

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