ABSTRACT
The archaeology of the Swahili coast is known primarily through excavations and documentation of towns, those settlements that witnessed rapid development after 1000 ce: places of commerce, of formal religious practice, and that showed evidence of hierarchy (Kirkman 1954; Chittick 1974; Horton 1996; Kusimba 1996; Radimilahy 1998; LaViolette and Fleisher 2005, 2009). In the last twenty years, however, researchers have recognised that to understand the full range of activities and lifeways in coastal stonetowns they need to investigate linked settlements at a variety of scales. These include villages in the immediate countryside surrounding towns (c.10–15 km from the town; Wright 1992; Radimilahy 1998; Fleisher 2010), those in the near hinterland extending up to 30 km inland (Abungu 1989; Wynne-Jones 2007a; Pawlowicz 2012), and those in the distant hinterland (or ‘interior’), perhaps extending hundreds of kilometres into the continent (Abungu and Mutoro 1993; Helm 2000; Walz 2010, this volume; Kusimba et al. 2013). In this chapter, I will focus on the differences between towns and villages at the smaller scales, covering the immediate countrysides and near hinterlands surrounding towns.
