A conference organized by the African Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
October 23-24, 2015
Please join us for a series of presentations about various aspects of East African maritime civilizations and culture. This conference will tackle the issue of the origins and development of maritime civilizations in East Africa that continue to have global impact to this day.
Conference Program
Venue: Room 209, Pyle Center
702 Langdon Street, Madison
Friday, October 23
8:00am Arrival, Registration, and Breakfast
8:30am Welcome
Akshay Sarathi, Graduate Student, Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
9:15am Prehistoric settlements on the Red Sea Coast of Eritrea: Implications for tracking early human interactions across the Red Sea Basin
Amanuel Beyin, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Louisville
Daniella E. Bar-Yosef Mayer, The Steinhardt Museum of Natural History
10:00am Change and Continuity in the 1200-year archaeological record of fishing in the eastern African coastal region
Eréndira M. Quintana Morales, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Rice University
10:45am Break
11:00am From the Indian Ocean to the Forest: When a Fly stops the Expansion of Islam
Sofiane Bouhdiba, Professor, University of Tunis
11:45am Social Organization and Traditional Maritime Trade in the Western Indian Ocean
Martin Ottenheimer, Professor Emeritus, Kansas State University
12:30pm Lunch
1:30pm Locating Medieval River Trade Routes in South-Eastern Zimbabwe and Mozambique, Identifying the Craft that Plied them, and their Linkages into Indian Ocean Maritime Networks Prior to 1500CE
Rosanne Hawarden, Professor, University of Canterbury
2:15pm To Read, to Write, to Ridicule: Knowledge and Expression in early Swahili History c. 1000-1500
David Bresnahan, Graduate Student, Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison
3:00pm Zilo and Zahula: Culinary Connections in the Indian Ocean
Harriet Ottenheimer, Professor Emerita, Kansas State University
3:45pm Break
4:05pm Islamic Charity as Oceanic Knowledge
Stephen A. Pierce, Assistant Professor of History, Indiana Wesleyan University
4:50pm Artistic Reconstructions of the East African Past
Cassandra Davis, MFA student, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
5:35pm End, walk to State Street for dinner and drinks
Saturday, October 24
8:30am Arrival and coffee
9:00am The Shipwrecks of Kilwa, Southeast Tanzania
Edward Pollard, Assistant Director, British Institute in Eastern Africa
9:45am Preliminary Report on Maritime Hunter Gatherers at Kuumbi Cave, Zanzibar: 1500 BCE to 1500 CE
Akshay Sarathi, Graduate Student, Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison
10:30am Trade and the Medieval Swahili State
Chap Kusimba, Professor of Anthropology, American University
11:15am Deconstructing the Waves of Austronesian Migration to Madagascar and the East African Coast
Roger Blench, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge University
12:00pm Lunch
1:00pm The Oriental African: The Evolution of Postcolonial Islamic Identities Among the Khōjā of Dar Es Salaam
Iqbal Akhtar, Professor of Religious Studies and Islamic Studies, Florida International University
1:45pm The Liquid Presence: Residues of Early Indian Ocean Entanglement in East Africa
Jonathan Walz, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Rollins College
2:30pm Closing and goodbyes
Conference organizer
Akshay Sarathi, doctoral candidate in Archaeology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Conference sponsor
African Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with additional support by the Department of Anthropology at UW-Madison