Wynne-Jones, Stephanie orcid.org/0000-0002-3005-8647 (2013) The public life of the Swahili stonehouse, 14th - 15th centuries AD. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. pp. 759-773. ISSN 0278-4165
Abstract
Houses are an important subject of archaeological research, normally explored through the households they contain. This has established a deliberately social agenda for the archaeology of houses, yet has had the unintended consequence of creating bounded worlds for study. Although household archaeologies explore the ways that households contributed to broader social and economic realms, it is rare to think through the public role of houses for non-residents and the larger population of the settlement. This paper seeks to explore this more public aspect of houses using the data from archaeology at Songo Mnara, a 14th–15th century Swahili town on the southern Tanzanian coast. This was a time when stone-built domestic architecture was first emerging in this region. The archaeology of the houses provides data for a series of ways that the house was at the heart of the economic and political life of the town, as well as demonstrating a spatial continuity between indoor and outdoor spaces. It is therefore suggested that the domestic and residential functions of the house for a particular household should be balanced with an appreciation of the broader world of the house itself.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | ©2013, The author. This is an Open Access article published under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported licence (CC-BY). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of York |
Academic Units: | The University of York > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (York) > Archaeology (York) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number AHRC AH/J502716/1 |
Depositing User: | Pure (York) |
Date Deposited: | 10 Nov 2014 11:27 |
Last Modified: | 03 Mar 2025 00:03 |
Published Version: | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2013.05.003 |
Status: | Published |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1016/j.jaa.2013.05.003 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:81561 |
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