About

Adria LaViolette is a Professor of Anthropology and the Director of the Interdisciplinary Archaeology Program at the University of Virginia. She holds a Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis, obtained in 1987. Her expertise encompasses the archaeology of Africa, with particular focus on the Iron Age, Swahili archaeology and history, precolonial urbanism, colonialism, household archaeology, craft specialization, and collaborative heritage management. LaViolette is an Africanist archaeologist with a focus on the transformations of medium- and large-scale societies over the last two millennia. Her Ph.D. research involved an ethnoarchaeological study of blacksmiths, potters, and masons in Jenne, Mali, within the context of long-standing traditions of craft specialization in the Inland Niger Delta. Throughout her career, LaViolette has conducted survey and excavation work on Swahili archaeological sites along the Tanzanian coast, including Pemba Island and Unguja Island in Zanzibar. She has co-directed research projects exploring household organization, regional political economy, the practice of Islam, and the interface of domestic economy with long-distance trade networks in Swahili coastal societies. Her recent work includes projects on Portuguese domestic and agricultural settlements in Zanzibar, aiming to integrate village-dwelling and non-elite coastal peoples into Swahili historiography. LaViolette has contributed extensively to the understanding of Swahili urbanism, craft industries, and the historical archaeology of the East African coast. She is also committed to local heritage development efforts and maintains long-term collaborations with colleagues in Tanzania.

Research topics

• Geography
• Archaeology
• History
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Ethnology
• Law
• Oceanography
• Ecology
• Geology
• Biology

Selected publications

• The Archaeology of Portuguese Agricultural Outposts in the Seventeenth-Century Zanzibar Countryside

  University Press of Florida eBooks · 2023-12-19 · 3 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The related archaeological sites of Fukuchani and Mvuleni in northwestern Unguja Island (Zanzibar, Tanzania) provide a rare opportunity to see inside rural seventeenth-century Portuguese colonial enterprises there, and to think about Portuguese interactions, intentions, and practices with Swahili people living in the nearby countryside. This chapter addresses primarily the archaeological evidence for life in two fortified Portuguese living- and workspaces, used for a short period and likely intended for commercial activities including tobacco cultivation and warehousing prior to shipment. The loop-holed defensive architecture at each site suggests possible tensions with local Swahili and fear of attack by Omanis and other Europeans, while the artifact assemblage provides insight into quotidian routines and social and economic relations with Swahili people. Building on a tradition of critical historical archaeology, findings point to the uneven nature of Portuguese colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, especially on the Kenyan and Tanzanian coasts, and contribute to the growing archaeology of colonial processes in this region.

  PublisherDOI

• Assembling Islamic practice in a Swahili urban landscape, 11th–16th centuries

  Journal of Social Archaeology · 2023 · 9 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  Spanning c. 1050–1500 CE, a burgeoning Swahili community called Chwaka built a sequence of four mortared coral mosques in their town of wattle-and-daub houses on Pemba Island, Tanzania. The mosques’ placement, construction, and use played an active role in creating and strengthening an Islamic community and help us define changes in social practice within the town and the larger polity in which it existed. It is argued that the construction of each mosque was an act of assembling, drawing people, other-than-human things and affective social practices together in ways that help tell an urban story. This research provides insights into the residents’ socioeconomic and cultural priorities and the town’s changing relationship with villagers from the surrounding region, contributing to understandings of Swahili urbanism and urban practice.

  PublisherDOI

• Archaeology and Oral Tradition in Malawi: Origins and Early History of the Chewa. Yusuf M. Juwayeyi. 2020. James Currey, Suffolk, UK; University of Cape Town Press, Cape Town, South Africa, xix + 242 pp. $99.00 (hardcover, James Currey), ISBN 978-1-84701-253-1. $14.95 (paperback, James Currey Africa), ISBN 978-1-84701-254-8. $37.95 (paperback, University of Cape Town Press) ISBN 978-1-77582-249-3).

  American Antiquity · 2023-03-20

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Archaeology and Oral Tradition in Malawi: Origins and Early History of the Chewa. Yusuf M. Juwayeyi. 2020. James Currey, Suffolk, UK; University of Cape Town Press, Cape Town, South Africa, xix + 242 pp. $37.95 (paperback, University of Cape Town Press) ISBN 978-1-77582-249-3). - Volume 88 Issue 4

  PublisherDOI

• Ethnoarchaeology

  African Archaeological Review · 2023-11-28 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• An archaeometallurgical investigation of iron smithing in Swahili contexts and its wider implications

  Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences · 2023-06-16

  articleOpen access

  Abstract This paper presents the most extensive archaeometallurgical study of iron-smithing debris excavated in East Africa. It presents an integrated methodology, including morphological, chemical, petrographic, and contextual analysis of iron slag excavated from secondary ironworking contexts. Iron slag from three Swahili sites was analysed—Unguja Ukuu located on the southwestern coast of Zanzibar, and Tumbe and Chwaka situated in the north-east of Pemba Island. The results suggest that Unguja Ukuu smithing is associated with oxidising hearth atmospheres and high amounts of CaO, while slag from Tumbe and Chwaka indicates reducing hearth atmospheres and high silica:alumina ratios, potentially pointing to the use of a flux. Distinct technical traditions can be seen at Unguja Ukuu when compared to Tumbe and Chwaka, suggesting a regional rather than chronological pattern. Temporal continuity is evident throughout the occupation of Unguja Ukuu and between sites of different periods in north-western Pemba. The spatial distribution of iron slag at these sites suggests that smithing was taking place across the extent of Unguja Ukuu, while slag scatters were more localised and disassociated from domestic contexts at Tumbe and Chwaka. The wealth of information on technological and organisational aspects of smithing obtained during this study indicates that an integrated methodology can yield valuable data for a variety of smithing sites, irrespective of excavation strategies.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Human-ecodynamics and the intertidal zones of the Zanzibar Archipelago

  Frontiers in Earth Science · 2022 · 9 citations

  • Geography
  • Ecology
  • Oceanography

  The intertidal zone, covering the nearshore fringe of coasts and islands and extending from the high-water mark to areas that remain fully submerged, encompasses a range of habitats containing resources that are as important to modern populations as they were to humans in prehistory. Effectively bridging land and sea, intertidal environments are extremely dynamic, requiring complexity and variability in how people engaged with them in the past, much as they do in the present. Here we review and reconsider environmental, archaeological, and modern socio-ecological evidence from the Zanzibar Archipelago on eastern Africa’s Swahili coast, focusing on marine molluscs to gain insight into the trajectories of human engagement with nearshore habitats and resources. We highlight the potential drivers of change and/or stability in human-intertidal interactions through time and space, set against a backdrop of the significant socio-economic and socio-ecological changes apparent in the archipelago, and along the Swahili coast, during the late Holocene.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• African islands: a comparative archaeology

  Azania Archaeological Research in Africa · 2022 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Archaeology
  • Geography
  • History
  PublisherDOI

• Stone Walls for Portuguese Pests: Swahili Landscape Responses to European Incursion on Zanzibar Island, Tanzania

  2020-01-01

  articleSenior author
  Publisher

• Editorial

  African Archaeological Review · 2018-11-29 · 1 citations

  editorialOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Zanzibar Before the Transnational Storm: Considerations of the Uneven Stops and Starts of the Colonial Project

  Society for Historical Archaeology · 2018-01-01

  articleSenior author
  Publisher

Recent grants

• US-Tanzania Dissertation Enhancement: Viewing Stonetowns from the Countryside: An Archaeological Approach to Swahili Urban Systems

  NSF · $2k · 1999–2000

• Town and Country: A Regional Study of Swahili Village and Urban Households

  NSF · $169k · 2002–2007

Frequent coauthors

• Jeffrey Fleisher

  Rice University

  7 shared

• Mark Horton

  Johns Hopkins University

  5 shared

• Neil Norman

  5 shared

• Nicole Boivin

  Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History

  4 shared

• Stephanie Wynne‐Jones

  4 shared

• Patrick Faulkner

  University of Sydney

  2 shared

• Thomas Vernet

  2 shared

• Alison Crowther

  2 shared