The Settlement History of Bwejuu Island, Mafia Archipelago, Tanzania

Abstract

Abstract Bwejuu Island lies in the Mafia archipelago, located in the Indian Ocean over one hundred and thirty kilometres from the metropolis of East Africa, Dar es Salaam. The record of the island’s earliest occupation likely reaches farther back in antiquity than has been so far received in the literature. Pioneering research in the mid-1950s attributed earliest occupation of the island to an Arab fisherman sometime during the nineteenth century Omani Arab colonisation of the coast. An archaeological survey conducted fifty years later yielded data suggesting that the island had already been occupied by 1300 CE . More recently acquired evidence supports the claim that the occupation of the island dates back to the fourteenth century. But the island may have been occupied much earlier, as hinted by the dates obtained through Thermoluminescence method. One of three pottery samples dated by this method yielded a date ranging from the last century BCE to the seventh century CE . This suggests that Bwejuu’s settlement history is as ancient as that of the rest of the Mafia archipelago, which is known to date to the early first millennium CE or even earlier.