ABSTRACT
For two millennia, societies in eastern and southeastern Africa have been engaged in Indian Ocean maritime trade. The shaping of identities accruing from trade and interaction across the Indian Ocean gave rise to and informed the culture and history of the Swahili. For many early archaeologists, the Swahili were theorised to be mere recipients of external change or were even imagined as immigrants themselves. Today the tension between external and internal change factors continues, but the transformative role of trade and technology in the evolution of Swahili society is now widely accepted (Kusimba et al. 1994; LaViolette and Fleisher 2005)
