Akshay Sarathi (Ed.): Early Maritime Cultures in East African and the Western Indian Ocean
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BOOK REVIEW
Akshay Sarathi (Ed.): Early Maritime Cultures in East African and the Western Indian Ocean Archaeopress, Oxford, 2018, 226 pp., ISBN 978-1784917128 Matthew Pawlowicz
Accepted: 31 October 2020 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
This interesting volume gathers together papers from a conference, titled “Early Maritime Cultures on the East African Coast,” held at the University of Wisconsin in the fall of 2015. It is part of the Access Archaeology initiative from Archaeopress, which develops openaccess e-pdfs for archaeological work that does not fit traditional publishing models. The volume demonstrates the value of the initiative, as the broad range of topics, themes, and geographical foci of the chapters make it difficult to identify a common theme, and there is no introduction or conclusion to provide such a synthesis. Yet in their variety, the chapters satisfy the editor’s objective to provide a rich interdisciplinary literature devoted to the study of the East African maritime past, placing that past within the context of the broader Indian Ocean and pushing the reader to consider new and cross-disciplinary perspectives. The volume is truly an eclectic mix, comprising 13 chapters, which explore a variety of spatial and temporal scales. It begins with a chapter by Amanuel Beyin and Daniella E. Bar-Yosef Mayer considering MSA/LSA sites along the Eritrean Red Sea coast, but the remainder focuses on more recent periods, including some focused primarily on the last few centuries. The contributors are drawn from a range of disciplinary backgrounds including archaeology, history, linguistics, art history, and anthropology. There is considerable diversity in the types of papers in the volume as well, with several M. Pawlowicz (*) Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, USA e-mail: [email protected]
chapters presenting data-heavy reports, others providing reviews of historical trends across broad geographic zones, and still more practicing a form of microhistory linking particular aspects of material culture from sites around the Indian Ocean with their larger context. This diversity means that different papers will appeal to different readers, but the volume pushes the reader to go beyond their specific interests to consider other time periods, places, and disciplinary perspectives. If there is a broader theme threaded through the chapters of this volume, it might be the concept of the “maritime silk road.” Recent interest in the history of connections across the Indian Ocean has been stimulated by the inclusion of a “21st Century Maritime Silk Road” component in the Belt-and-Road Initiative of the People’s Republic of China, which often explicitly invokes that history. Several of the chapters reference and engage with such connections, albeit to varying degrees. For instance, the chapters by Sing C. Chew and by Wensuo Liu and Yanrong Wang provide useful overviews of the maritime networks of the Indian Ocean, during the Classical Period and early second millennium C
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