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Lines of Desire: Power and Materiality Along a Tanzanian Caravan Route

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Abstract

The caravan routes that connected the East African interior to the coast are well known from the nineteenth century, when trade along them was intense and increasingly formalised. It is understood that this brought important changes in the structure of society, in people–object relations and in the opportunities for the exercise of power; we also assume that this situation differed from pre-colonial periods, yet very little archaeological work has examined that assumption. Understandings of the incorporation of this region into a larger world of commodity exchange have been based upon implicit assumptions about the role of trade; these often stress the underdevelopment of East Africa. Yet it is necessary to examine the ways in which foreign goods were made commensurable with valuables and assets in the regional economy before it is possible to discuss the ways that access to these goods may have affected local power structures. This paper attempts such an analysis, through a focus on two areas in the interior which have been the subject of recent archaeological field work. By tracing the specific histories of their interaction with objects before and during the nineteenth century, it examines the assumption that the accumulation of exotic objects was necessarily the basis of authority. Instead, it will be argued that the ways in which new opportunities and objects were incorporated were specific and local, fitting within existing schemes of understanding and the authorisation of power.

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Acknowledgments

Reconnaissance survey in the area of Ujiji was conducted together with Sarah Croucher and certainly could not have been imagined without her. Excavations were conducted by Alexander Pullen, Lauren Cadwallader, Sarah Wolff, Wilfred Alex, Festo Wachawaseme and Joseph Mutua. I am grateful to Ayub Kalufya for his local knowledge and for giving up his time to guide us in Uvinza. The fieldwork was funded by the British Institute in Eastern Africa.

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  1. Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol, 43 Woodland Road, Bristol, BS8 1UU, UK

    Stephanie Wynne-Jones

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Correspondence to Stephanie Wynne-Jones.

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Wynne-Jones, S. Lines of Desire: Power and Materiality Along a Tanzanian Caravan Route. J World Prehist 23, 219–237 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10963-010-9040-4

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