Jeffrey Fleisher

cv: pdf

publications:

email: jfleisher at rice dot edu

Current Interests

         I am an anthropological archaeologist with interests in complex societies, urbanization, political economy, regional and landscape archaeology, households, and power.  My research is focused on the Swahili coast in eastern Africa, where I have had a long-term commitment to recovering the settlement history of a particular region on Pemba Island , Tanzania .  This work has been aimed at a number of issues:  My previous work attempted to understand the character of ancient Swahili urbanism (prior to AD1500)—and to evaluate the proposition of coastal urbanism in general—through survey and excavations in the area surrounding three known Swahili stonetowns. 

            More recently, I have completed the field portions of a three year project that returned to this region to look more closely at the political economy of one of these stonetown regions.  By identifying and excavating houses of non-elite urban and rural residents, this project attempts to build an understanding of the local domestic economy and how it articulated with the better known Indian Ocean economy within which the Swahili operated.  I am currently working on a monograph that details this research with Prof. Adria LaViolette and Prof. Bertram Mapunda. 

            During the summer of 2008, I initiated the Coastal Ceramics Project with Dr. Stephanie Wynne-Jones.  This project involves a comprehensive reanalysis of early coastal pottery—that of the early Tana Tradition—with the aim of building a comparative database.  We will use this database to begin examining the variability between coastal assemblages, with the goal of understanding how ceramic assemblages represent different coastal regions.  We aim to make this data public and accessible to other researchers.