Coastal communities in southern Africa were active participants in Indian Ocean trade networks from 600 CE onward, not passive recipients of goods and ideas from elsewhere. ENTANGLED aims to recover their role in shaping global connections during the Middle Ages (500–1500 CE), a period when objects, innovations, and religions spread across the ocean. The problem is that global history is written from a European perspective, leaving southern Africa’s coastal societies as a blind spot. Archaeologists and historians know that gold from the interior reached the coast, and that goods from as far as China arrived there, but they do not understand how local communities organised trade, what they valued, or how they influenced the networks they were part of. This is fundamental research. It will combine materials analysis of traded objects with historical and ethnographic study to reconstruct ontologies of exchange—how people understood value, reciprocity, and connection. If successful, ENTANGLED will reposition southern Africa within global history, challenging the assumption that globalisation was driven solely from the north. There is no immediate practical application; the payoff is a more accurate, less Eurocentric understanding of how human societies became interconnected.
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Research into global connections, which formed the basis for the spread of objects, ideas, innovations, religions and empires, continues to fundamentally shape our understanding of the development of contemporary society. While the historiography of global connections is dominated by a European perspective, new research into overlooked vantage points combined with innovative methodological and theoretical approaches provide important opportunities to challenge and enrich perspectives of global history. ENTANGLED will develop a multiscalar, multimodal approach that brings together distinct lines of enquiry to study the nature and impact of global connections in past societies. Shaped by a critical and robust theoretical framework of entanglement, ENTANGLED will approach the study of global interactions using an interdisciplinary methodology, combining cutting-edge archaeological materials-based analyses of objects traded and consumed by communities across the Indian Ocean with historical and ethnographic research aimed at uncovering ontologies of exchange. The geographical and temporal focus of ENTANGLED is the coastal regions of southern Africa, the southernmost westerly point of the extensive Indian Ocean world in the Global Middle Ages (500-1500 CE). Despite early evidence of contact between communities on the southern African coastline and the wider Indian Ocean maritime network from 600 CE, the relationship between coastal communities and the networks that linked them to the gold producing regions of the interior and the maritime routes of the Indian Ocean region remain poorly understood. Addressing the development of maritime economies in southern Mozambique, the nature and directionality of trade routes that linked interior and coastal communities, and the value of traded items across diverse paths of exchange and consumption, ENTANGLED will assess the agency of coastal communities in shaping global connections and reposition southern Africa in global history.
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