Rock Crystal Trade.
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Taken from: Mark Horton · Nicole Boivin · Alison Crowther · Ben Gaskell · Chantal Radimilahy · Henry Wright: East Africa as a Source for Fatimid Rock Crystal. Workshops from Kenya to Madagascar. 2015
Shanga
46 crystal beads were excavated from Shanga; most were spheroid, and some were faceted. Eight were discarded wasters (14 %), suggesting that there was a local bead making industry. There were also small quantities of pure crystal waste – seven discarded cores. Other evidence for working crystal was a half-worked cone, a cube and button that had been discarded half finished.
A single piece of this crystal was found in the site Phase 2, around 800, but the majority of both beads and waste occurred between sites Phases 9 and 16 (mid-10th to mid-13th century).
Zanzibar and Pemba Islands
During the 1990s, a number of sites were excavated on Zanzibar and Pemba islands. The earliest site to contain crystal was Unguja Ukuu, which new Sealinks research securely dates from the late 7th century to the 11th century. A single piece of waste crystal was found deeply stratified in a probable 8th century level. Waste crystal was also found at Tumbatu, a later site spanning the 11th to 14th century, as well as a crystal cube. The nearby site of Mkokotoni produced 24 pieces of waste crystal in a single cache, probably in a 13th century context. Two other pieces of waste were found at Mtambwe Mkuu and Ras Mkumbuu. In addition, eight spheroid beads found at Unguja Ukuu, Mkokotoni, Tumbatu and Mtambwe Mkuu were unpolished and mis-drilled, suggesting local manufacturing, and were similar to carnelian beads found at Tumbatu. Altogether, these finds suggest early processing at Unguja Ukuu and 13th century crystal working at Tumbatu and Mkokotoni.
Kilwa
The major excavations by Neville Chittick in the 1960s at Kilwa produced very limited finds of crystal, partly because he did not sieve his deposits, and so would have missed the majority of stone beads.
He lists 17 crystal beads from his excavations and a further seven found on the beach plus a cube of crystal. He also found a »large lump of amorphous quartz« at Husuni Kubwa in the southern court, dating to around 1300. In the collections of the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin, among many thousands of beads collected in the late 19th century on the beach only three were made of crystal.
Comoro Islands
Claude Allibert’s excavations at Dembeni in 1984, an 8th-11th century site on Mayotte, recorded 19 crystal quartz flakes in Dembeni Phase 1 (9th to 10th century) and a single bead. More recently, Stephane Pradines returned to the site and has claimed this to be a major distribution center for rock crystal. He located a wall, possibly forming an enclosure, and within it were numerous pieces of rock crystal, although exact counts have not been supplied; a published photograph includes seven pieces, the largest with a length of 6 cm. A later survey located 18 pieces of crystal, the largest weighing 400 g. The Sealinks fieldwork at Old Sima (Anjouan) in 2013 located a single flake in a 9th century context.
Mahilaka
The largest quantity of archaeological crystal was however found in the coastal site of Mahilaka, northwest Madagascar. Here 371 flakes were found, of which 90 % were clear, other colors included pink, white and light green. In addition, ten blocks of crystal (two weighing 75 g), three beads, and a prism-shaped object were found. Most of the crystal comes from the central fort-like structure, which probably dates from the 11th century. The majority of pieces, however, were attributed to site Period IIa that may date to the 12th and 13th centuries.
Vohemar
This was once one of the main ports on the north-eastern coast of Madagascar, although the modern town nowadays covers the main occupation area of the ancient site. Most of the archaeological work has concentrated around the tombs on the edge of the town, which date to the 15th century. Crystal beads were found in these tombs, and were buried as grave goods. In 2014, a large lump of pure quartz of unknown origin was observed on the corniche and ornamental quartz is traded through Vohemar today.
Nosy Mangabe
On this small island in north-eastern Madagascar, located in a sheltered bay, has some of the earliest evidence for settlement on the island dating to the 7th or 8th century. The Sealinks excavations in 2015 relocated these areas, which had been discovered by Pierre Vérin and Henry Wright. One piece of crystal weighing almost 1 kg was found in these lower early levels probably dating to the 9th century. From the same levels were found a piece of Islamic white glazed ware and a single sherd of turquoise glazed ware (»Sasanian Islamic«) – this is only the second piece found on Madagascar , and dates to before the Fatimid period.
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The Swahili Corridor by Mark Horton 1987.
In about 960 a radical change took place. Within a single decade Europe was flooded with magnificent examples of carved elephant ivory. This appeared in the Christian world, and in the Islamic world, many of the pieces are more than 110 mm across, a diameter achieved only by the tusks of the African elephant. Rock crystal shows a similar pattern. Late in the 10th century the crystal-carving industry was transformed. From the workshops of Fatimid Egypt came the finest rock-crystal working. The earliest examples from 975, and over the next 60 years production was so great that more than 100 surviving objects can be attributed to these workshops. Contemporary accounts suggest that the newly available crystal came from East Africa. Gold was the most important product for the Mediterranean economy. The traditional view has been that most of the gold for the Fatimid mints came from West Africa. The array of evidence from art history, documents of the time and other sources makes it clear that East Africa was the new source of rock crystal, ivory and gold for the 10th century Mediterranean world. In that brief period archaeological discoveries have confirmed the route's existence and demonstrated the central role of the Swahili in establishing it.
Many of the Swahili sites were small village communities. Several, however, were highly urbanized, with hundreds of stone houses and populations greater than 10,000. An important part of that culture was Islam. According to contemporary Arabic descriptions, the Swahili traders were Muslims who followed a way of life comparable to that seen in the Middle East.
By the beginning of the 10th century the trading system centered on the Persian Gulf was in decline.
The Zanj Revolt, in Mesopotamia at the end of the ninth century, reduced the scale of the African trade. Commerce between Siraf and China, which had provided the largest market for East African ivory, diminished greatly during the political instability following the ending of the Tang dynasty in 906. Commercial decline is reflected in the archaeological record on the East African coast: many early sites failed to survive the collapse and were abandoned. Into the vacuum created in this way came merchants from the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Those traders, who had connections with the Mediterranean rather than with China, needed to establish permanent trading relationships with the Swahili rulers of the coast.
The way of life, which closely mimicked the Muslim courts of the Middle East, was adopted by the Swahili rulers who had contact with the Red Sea merchants. At Mtambwe Mkuu, an 11th-century site on the island of Pemba, Mark Horton found a hoard of silver coins and 10 gold and seven of
these are Fatimid dinars from Mediterranean mints. The other three are copies of Fatimid coins inscribed with bogus Arabic writing; these imitations may have been struck in East Africa. The only other coins resembling them come from Fatimid Sicily in the 11th century.
The supply of rock crystal lasted for only about a century. By 1050 rock crystal had vanished from coastal sites in the Lamu archipelago. At about the same time the workshops in the Mediterranean ceased production in crystal and turned to substitutes such as clear glass.
The cultural unity of the Swahili corridor is suggested by the fact that although Chibuene is 2,500 kilometers from Shanga, the local earthenware pottery and the imported glazed jars and bowls are identical with those found in the Lamu archipelago.