@article{HistoricalLandscapesoftheSandaweHomeland:3420,
      recid = {3420},
      author = {Knisley, Matthew Charles},
      title = {Historical Landscapes of the Sandawe Homeland,  North-central Tanzania},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2021-08},
      pages = {339},
      abstract = {This dissertation comprises an archaeological  investigation of landscape occupation, food-getting  repertoires, political and economic networks, and  cosmological traditions over the last 3,000 years in what  is now the Sandawe homeland of north-central Tanzania.  Contemporary ethno-linguistic classification has been used  as a proxy for reconstructing long-term socio-political and  techno-economic histories of Africa. As the only location  where all African language families exist side-by-side,  north-central Tanzania has been described as one of the  most ethnologically complex on the continent. Based on  ethnographic, oral historical, linguistic, and genetic  evidence, the Sandawe homeland has been characterized as an  isolated social and ecological refuge for a relict  population of Khoisan-speaking foragers. Khoisan-speakers  are thought to be related branches of a deep-time lineage,  ethnographic observations of which have contributed to an  anthropological archetype: that of the low-latitude,  immediate-return, egalitarian band. This social form has  been described as stable and conservative baseline from  which later complexity emerged. Thus, a dominant concern of  scholarship on the Sandawe has been to “peel back” the  effects of their interactions with food-producers to reveal  the Khoisan cultural core, which is then projected into the  past. Categorizing the Sandawe not only as Khoisan foragers  (linguistically and culturally) but as autochthonous (that  is, having emerged in situ) has led to historical  reconstructions of the group that are, in effect, timeless.  Oral histories describe a foraging past, but the Sandawe  were engaged in a diverse food-getting repertoire that  included agriculture and pastoralism at the time of their  first ethnographic descriptions, and foraging contributes  significantly to present-day Sandawe identity. Taken  together, these factors make the homeland an ideal case  study for examining interdisciplinary models concerning the  spread of food production and the subsequent relations  between foragers and food-producers – namely, those of  food-producing frontiers and political economic mosaics.  

Remarkably, archaeology has seldom featured in  reconstructions of Sandawe pasts even though the group and  their homeland are often evoked in long-term histories of  Africa. During two seasons of fieldwork between 2015 and  2018, the Usandawe Landscape Archaeology Project gathered  multi-scalar, landscape-level artifactual assemblages  through systematic surface and subsurface sampling,  selective surveys of rockshelters, and excavations at  open-air and rockshelter sites. Over 375 sites were  recorded, yielding artifacts ranging from the Early Stone  Age (up to 2.6 mya) to the present. Material culture and  spatial analyses indicate that food production and  extra-regional exchange were longer established and  followed different trajectories than has been proposed for  the homeland. A diverse food-getting repertoire that  entailed both foraging and food-production is time-deep in  the homeland, and inhabitants of this region had  well-established links to networks that ranged in scale  from the Rift Valley zone of eastern Africa to the  commodity flows of the Indian Ocean World and global  modernity. This suggests that the region’s characterization  as a hinterland is based on a misrecognition of how its  inhabitants have engaged with networks extending beyond the  homeland through time rather than their actual isolation  from these networks. 

Beyond interpretations based on  ethnography, linguistics, and recent history, little  material evidence exists concerning how the diverse  foraging communities of eastern Africa organized themselves  and in relation to changing regional milieus. This  dissertation is one of the first to apply the methods of  landscape and historical archaeology to the study of  foraging in Tanzania rather than to complex societies of  the interior or urban, coastal societies with  well-documented ties to maritime trade networks and  colonial states. In addition to reexamining the history of  the homeland in relation to long-term regional trends, this  dissertation contributes to scholarship on forager  diversity, the spread of food production, precolonial  political and economic systems, and interdisciplinary  approaches to prehistory and history. Most broadly, this  dissertation contributes to reexaminations of the forager  category and its role in reconstructions of African and, by  extension, human history. },
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/3420},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.3420},
}