Bio

I am an archaeologist investigating long-term societal responses to climatic, environmental, and sociopolitical change, in the context of emerging urbanism and early globalization in tropical eastern Africa.

I focus on the emergence of interconnected urban societies on the Swahili Coast in eastern Africa and the broader Indian Ocean world over the last 2000 years. My research has implications for sustainability, climate adaptation, and natural disaster mitigation in modern tropical cities, especially in Africa where rapid urbanization will be a major factor in the sociopolitical and environmental transformations of the 21st century.

I have extensive experience organizing and directing archaeological research projects. I integrate traditional survey and excavation techniques with computational and digital methods, advanced geospatial technologies, community-based research design, and training and mentoring for early career scholars from underrepresented and underserved backgrounds.

I write about:

• social transformation and environmental diversification
• open-access methods for archaeological predictive modeling with environmental datasets
• material culture and non-elite political strategies
• studying coastal eastern African archaeological landscape palimpsests with satellite imagery
• archaeology and remote sensing in rapidly urbanizing tropical environments
• using drone imagery to assess the anthropogenic legacies of baobab trees in eastern Africa
• Raiding, refuge, and mobility in the Swahili world (in press!)
• Forced displacement, disaster, and migration on the Swahili Coast from a long-term perspective (in review!)
• Long-term urban trajectories in the eastern African tropics (in review!)

I earned my PhD from the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley in 2022. My research has been funded by the US National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, Horizon Europe, Universitas 21, the American Philosophical Society, and the US National Endowment for the Humanities.

Projects

• I am an incoming Marie-Skłodowska Curie (MSCA) postdoctoral fellow at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at Cambridge University (2026-2028). My project, Simulating African Agro-Pastoral Routes and Interactions (SAFARI), studies the intersection of climate, biogeography, and models for exchange between urbanites and agro-pastoral groups on the Kenya coast from 500-1500 CE. I will develop predictive models for site detection and field surveys to identify material culture exchanges between mobile societies and Indian Ocean trading networks, and theorize about the environmental conditions and anthropogenic legacies of urbanization in eastern Africa.

• I am co-directing the CALOR project in Tanzania, exploring social reorganization, connectivity, and adaptations to climate change and environmental disaster on the eastern African Swahili Coast. My co-directors are Elinaza Mjema (University of Dar Es Salaam) and Ioana Dumitru (University of Sydney).

• I was a visiting research scholar (2024-2025) at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, where I used remote sensing and environmental datasets to model resource landscapes related to the earliest exchanges between eastern Africa and the Indian Ocean economic system of late antiquity.

• As a National Science Foundation Fellow at the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies at the University of Arkansas, I directed the Zanzibar Urban-Rural Complexity Project (ZURCP) from 2022-2024. This project investigated urban emergence and change around Zanzibar Stone Town, one of the largest and longest-lasting urban centers on the Swahili Coast. We successfully leveraged satellite and drone imagery to model areas where archaeological surveys could detect archaeological sites within the interstices of the rapidly urbanizing modern city.

• For my PhD thesis at UC Berkeley, I explored rural Swahili adaptations to elite emergence and colonialism in northern Zanzibar, using field surveys and satellite remote sensing to assess settlement reorganization and land-use change across diverse environments.

Analyzing ceramics with students and members of the Zanzibar Department of Museums and Antiquities. Zanzibar, summer 2023.

Why Africa?

Why practice archaeology in Africa? As an archaeologist, I am motivated by big questions: What processes led humans to start intensifying food production? Why did people start living in large, specialized urban societies? Finally, how did people in the past exchange goods and ideas over vast distances, creating early globalized societies, and what types of environmental and climatic conditions impacted these changes? These complex activities are recent and emergent human experiments, the long-term outcomes of which are yet unclear. Likely, they will have drastic implications for the course of our species and planet, so it is vital to understand their timing, nature, and impacts for the present and future.

African archaeology demonstrates that processes leading to environmental change, food production, connectivity, and urbanism developed along unique and diverse pathways on the continent, in ways that continually force us to rethink global anthropological understandings of these trajectories. For instance, in East Africa, urban mercantile societies coexisted alongside hunter-gatherer, pastoralist, and intensified agriculturalist foodways for many centuries, and class stratification occurred in the absence of any overarching territorial state. Tropical environmental conditions also created unique, low-density urban-rural arrangements that differ from comparable urban developments in other parts of the world.

Africa has enormous global significance but it is understudied, and therefore misunderstood. Investigating anthropological questions in Africa also means countering outdated assumptions about the region, like the notion that African societies were historically static, or dominated by environmental factors. These ideas could not be further from the truth. Archaeology, done in collaboration with African institutions and local communities, is uniquely suited to shed light on the dynamic societies of the African past and help address challenges of the African and global present.

Swahili tomb, Kunduchi, Tanzania.

Research Agenda

I use geospatial and archaeological methods to investigate settlement trajectories in coastal and tropical environments, to understand urban resilience in the past and address Anthropocene challenges in the present. My research investigates factors that shaped sedentism, urbanism, and the formation of hierarchical and heterarchical social arrangements in Swahili towns and cities in this region, using regional-scale environmental data and satellite and drone remote sensing to model the biogeographical conditions and anthropogenic impacts of these activities, which formed emergent historical-environmental systems. This research highlights the agency of small-scale, non-elite, and rural societies in shaping transformations at the scale of landscapes, regions, and global socioecological systems. I draw on the insights of long-term archaeological data to inform contemporary approaches to Anthropocene challenges like climate change, natural catastrophes, and sociopolitical conflict. The long-term factors and consequences of urbanization in the global tropics are only beginning to be understood, despite the fact that urban expansion in the 21st century will primarily occur in tropical regions, in Asia and Africa. Africa in particular is poised to urbanize faster than anywhere else on Earth by 2050, which will undoubtedly have future environmental and sociopolitical consequences at many scales. Archaeology in Africa, in partnership with African institutions and communities, has a key role to play in shaping sustainable policy for urban development.

Methodologically, my engagement is with geospatial technologies for archaeology. I use GNSS mapping, drones, multispectral satellite imagery, historical maps, and spatial statistics to model environments and to help understand human settlement trends across large regions. In my work I seek to develop free and open-access methods for geospatial and archaeological research, enabling broader participation in archaeological science for places without the funding or licensing agreements to obtain cutting-edge geospatial hardware and software. In particular, I have translated GIS workflows from ArcGIS to QGIS and worked with freely available satellite imagery, like data from Planet.

I am committed to decolonial approaches to archaeological practice. This means collaborative research engagements with African academic institutions and local communities and stakeholders. For my PhD and subsequent postdoctoral work in Zanzibar, this meant practicing archaeology in the Swahili language, holding community meetings that shaped research design, disseminating archaeological reports in Swahili to local communities, and training Tanzanian archaeologists in partnership with the Zanzibar Department of Museums and Antiquities, with which I maintain strong connections. With my new project in Pangani, our CALOR team has ongoing collaborations with the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Management at the University of Dar es Salaam, where our Tanzanian-American-Australian research team is committed to building local research capacity and providing training for Tanzanian undergraduate and graduate level stuudents. We are also in the process of developing new community outreach programs and collaborations with local residents, officials, and other stakeholders in the Pangani region where the work is proceeding.

Mangroves and the sea, taken on field survey. Fuoni, Zanzibar.

Last updated September 2025, Wolfgang Alders