A new analysis of medieval DNA samples recovered from the Swahili coast has revealed the overseas roots of the region’s trading culture.
The Swahili coast, stretching more than 3000 kilometers from southern Ethiopia to Tanzania, was a hub of medieval trade, exporting ivory and other resources from the African interior to South Asia, the Arab world, and Persia. Its cultural legacy remains potent: Swahili is now spoken across large parts of Africa, and the ruins of ancient towns, many with mosques and other buildings cut from shoreline coral deposits, record the coast’s heyday.
Gathered at seven sites in modern-day Kenya and Tanzania, the data represent the largest ancient DNA study yet from an African context. Combined with archaeological evidence from towns all along the Swahili coast and genetic evidence from people living there today, “It’s really an extraordinary piece of scholarship,” says Peter Schmidt, an archaeologist at the University of Florida who was not involved in the research.
When Kusimba started to excavate the cemeteries of Swahili towns in the mid-1990s, what he found supported that picture. Of the artifacts he recovered, 95% were of local origin, he says, with only a few imported trade goods. But Kusimba decided to search for more direct evidence about the origins of the Swahili founders.
To collaborators familiar with Swahili culture past and present, however, a violent takeover seemed implausible. The society has been and remains matriarchal and matrilocal, with husbands moving in with their wives’ families. “Houses are owned by women, and women were the foundation of households,” says co-author Stephanie Wynne-Jones, an archaeologist at the University of York.
The unions were win-win: Local elites gained blood ties to far-off trading networks and the prestige of being related to people in Persia, an important center of the medieval Muslim world. Merchants, meanwhile, gained a foothold in local markets along with trusted partners to run their business during long overseas voyages. “It’s a cunning strategy,” Schmidt says. “They’re buying into existing infrastructure and networks.
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