Rice archaeologist studies
‘ancient urbanism’ on an East African island

BY ALYSON WARD
Rice News staff

Songo Mnara, once a thriving city
off the coast of Tanzania in East Africa, has been empty and abandoned for many
more centuries than it flourished. A city no longer, it has crumbled,
unoccupied and undisturbed, for more than 600 years. But a Rice researcher is
determined to uncover its buried secrets.

	Jeffrey Fleisher, an assistant professor of anthropology, already has spent two summers sifting through the ruins of this 15th-century Swahili settlement.

Jeffrey Fleisher, an assistant
professor of anthropology and currently a faculty fellow in the Humanities Research Center, already has spent two summers sifting through the
ruins of this 15th-century Swahili settlement. He and his partner on the
project, University of York archaeologist Stephanie Wynne-Jones, chose to study
this remote place as an example of ”ancient urbanism.”

”We’re interested in why cities
worked the way they worked and why cities looked the way they looked,” Fleisher
said, noting that Songo Mnara is an excellent subject for study.

A National Science Foundation
grant, awarded last month, will allow the team to return to the island in 2013
and 2015. And that grant will fund some groundbreaking research: Fleisher and
Wynne-Jones are the first researchers to do any significant work at Songo
Mnara, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The island town, which developed as a
trading port, has remained relatively untouched since it was deserted around
1500.

”The town was built very rapidly and then was lived in for
100-150 years and then abandoned,” Fleisher said. ”And because it was in a
pretty remote place, nobody ever lived there since.”

This makes Songo Mnara prime
property for archaeologists who want to study how urban areas develop. More
than 40 houses and several mosques are still partially standing. Rather than
burrow down through several layers of deposits to understand how a city
developed over hundreds of years, Fleisher and his team can study this
well-preserved ”snapshot” of a city that was built and deserted in a short
amount of time.

”Instead of going deep,” Fleisher
said, ”we can go wide, and we can begin to look at the
spatial arrangement.”

It’s a different kind of
archaeology for East Africa, and that’s why most archaeologists have shown no
interest in Songo Mnara, Fleisher said. ”But that’s exactly why we’re
interested in it.”

In 2009 and 2011, Fleisher, some
other archaeologists and a team of students – including a few Rice anthropology
majors — made six-week journeys to this island that has no fresh water or
electricity. ”It’s pretty rustic,” Fleisher said; they waded through a mangrove
swamp to reach the site and camped in tents near the ruins. Here they looked
for clues as to how the town developed and how its people lived — their daily
activities, how they used their buildings and their public spaces, where they
gathered and why.

A team led by Rice’s Jeffrey Fleisher is uncovering the secrets of Songo Mnara, once a thriving city off the coast of Tanzania in East Africa.

Fleisher has split up the project
with his partner, and each leads a team with a different focus. Fleisher said
Wynne-Jones’ work ”is very much focused on the domestic structures, the houses.
And I’m interested in the spaces between
the houses – the open spaces.”

It’s a tricky goal, trying to
find what’s not there. Fleisher’s team
has used magnetometry to locate places underground where the soil has been
disturbed. They have also located phytoliths, which are plant fossils of silica
that some plants leave behind, indicating where they were planted or used.

With these clues, the team
identified a rectangular open space near the city’s wall. They dug about 300
small holes into that open area, then picked up artifacts and took soil samples
that will help determine how this space was used.

”What we don’t really know about
is: What were people doing in the open spaces?” Fleisher said. ”Were these
spaces gardens, orchards, markets? Were there places people made offerings
outside?”

Fleisher’s team also located a
cemetery in the town’s center, an arrangement that seems to make it a city
focal point. A bioarchaeologist joined the team this summer to excavate 13 of
the burials, examining human remains that, though 600 years old, were
remarkably well-preserved.

”We learned a lot of things about
the physical bodies,” Fleisher said, ”but we also learned a lot of things about
how people handled death and commemorated death afterward.”

Fleisher knows he’ll find even
more clues when he returns to the site in 2013. He and Wynne-Jones plan to
excavate large houses and open areas, to ”go wide” and examine the city’s
layout for clues about how it developed.

”It’s hard work, but it’s very
rewarding – for the students, especially,” Fleisher said. With each trip to
Songo Mnara, he said, ”You always find something interesting, and you always
find things that are surprising.”