Evidence that European trade was built on Indigenous trade routes from the coast to the interior was found in mountain caves in eastern-central Africa.
Increased European political and economic interest in the Indian Ocean influenced trade between merchants and communities in the African interior in the 19th century.
The study, published in the journal African Archaeological Review, is based on a collection of 29 glass beads excavated at three sites in the Kasitu Valley. Most of the beads were made in Europe using glass recipes that were popular in the 19th century. From the 15th to the 17th century, glass beads were made in South Asia.
According to the beads' provenance, people in the region were either directly or indirectly trading with Europeans before the second half of the 19th century began.
It was most likely associated with increased trade in commodities such as gum copal and ivory, which were prized in Europe and North America. The capture and transport of enslaved people, who were taken in chains to spice plantations in the Indian Ocean islands, may have been involved.
Thompson is an assistant professor of anthropology at Yale and the paper's senior author. The Indian Ocean traders had access to European goods that they could exchange for things in high demand in distant places. There was a slave trade that continued for several more decades.
Thompson's research usually focuses on older human groups. Glass beads started showing up in the sieves of the sites she was working at. The beads have a diameter of less than 5 millimeter. The smallest was less than 2mm.
She said that some of the beads were so small that they didn't know they were beads. They look like tiny specks.
Thompson and her co-authors collaborated with Laure Dussubieux, a senior research scientist at the Field Museum in Chicago, to analyze the beads' composition. The beads were zapped with a high energy laser in order to determine their makeup.
Thousands of glass beads have been found at dozens of sites since 1966 and this was the first time this technique was used.
The beads' chemical composition was used by the researchers. The beads in the study contained high levels of arsenic, which was used in European recipes to make glass opaque. The center of Europe's beadmaking industry is believed to have been in Venice.
Around the time the Scottish missionary David Livingstone was creating maps of the African interior, they were manufactured. The British established governance in the country.
The only example in the collection with a non- European origin was a single bead. It likely arrived in the eastern African interior hundreds of years before the European beads after being produced in Chaul, a town on the Maharashtra coast of India.
Two cowrie shells, which were abundant in the Indian Ocean and used as currency and jewelry, were found at a fourth site. The glass beads of European and Indian origin arrived in inland communities via long-established trade networks according to Thompson.
She said that this shows that people were already trading through very complex routes from the Indian Ocean over mountains and around lakes before Europeans began documenting their experiences in the region. Long-term Indigenous interactions were creating trade routes for newcomers to Africa.
She said that it wasn't just a story of Europeans arriving and distributing their goods to people in the African interior. The people living there used to trade for goods from the Indian Ocean. If you only relied on written accounts, important information could stay hidden.
More information: Laure Dussubieux et al, European Trade in Malawi: The Glass Bead Evidence, African Archaeological Review (2022). DOI: 10.1007/s10437-022-09486-6
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