About Me

I am a landscape archaeologist with expertise in geospatial and digital archaeological methods including GIS, satellite remote sensing, drone remote sensing, GNSS/GPS mapping, lidar and photogrammetry. 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, The African Research Universities Alliance, the American Philosophical Society, and the US National Endowment for the Humanities.

Survey team in Pangani, 2024 — Myself and team members on survey in 2024 in Pangani, Tanzania.

I am interested in how archaeology can recover overlooked experiences of the global Anthropocene. I research the archaeology and deep history of eastern Africa and the Indian Ocean world, focusing on how ancient globalization reshaped tropical coastal environments and influenced settlement growth, adaptation, and sustainability over the last 1500 years. My current projects focus on the port communities of the ancient and historical Swahili of the Tanzanian and Kenyan coasts, but I have also worked in Oman, the Philippines, Kazakhstan, and the American West. In addition to geospatial techniques, my projects employ multidisciplinary methods including archival, historical, and ethnographic research, ceramic analysis, geoarchaeological methods, and other aspects of archaeological science.

Research and Teaching: Africa, Globalization, and the Anthropocene

Archaeology, with its deep time focus and emphasis on the collective activities and experiences of daily life, is uniquely suited for understanding the trajectories that have produced the Anthropocene, the recent period of Earth’s history that has been predominately shaped by human activities. Most recently, these include the extractive processes of colonialism and modern industrial capitalism, but researchers have also increasingly revealed deeper histories of socioecological globalization going back back thousands of years.

Though the Anthropocene is a global process, research tends to overlook the experiences, contributions, and adaptations of societies in the Global South, despite the fact that modern populations in these places are most acutely affected by extreme climate changes directly caused by human influence. Archaeology in places like eastern Africa and the Indian Ocean, therefore, offers the chance to diversify and reshape collective understandings of the shared global events which have reshaped our Earth and which will be enormously consequential for the future of our species. My research and teaching centers African and Indian Ocean experiences of Anthropocene transformations through an emphasis on deep histories of globalization, socioecological transformation, and settlement reorganization.

stratigraphy — Taking micromorphological samples from a site on the Pangani River to help understand flooding events and reconstruct depositional histories, 2026.

I am committed to decolonial approaches to archaeological research, training, and teaching. This means working in partnership with Tanzanian and Kenyan scholars, collaborating with local communities and stakeholders, and making room for outreach to disseminate research results to the public in the US, the UK, and eastern Africa. For my PhD and subsequent postdoctoral work in Zanzibar, I practiced 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 newer 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 students.

Projects

SAFARI (Simulating African Agro-Pastoralist Routes and Interactions) - Ongoing

Zebu cattle grazing near the Pangani River, northern Tanzania

My newest project, funded by Horizon Europe through a Marie-Skłodowska Curie fellowship at Cambridge University, is called Simulating African Agro-Pastoral Routes and Interactions (SAFARI). I am using archaeological, historical and geospatial methods to investigate the deep history of long-distance exchange among historical cattle pastoralists in Kenya, their interactions with urban societies, and their role in shaping the caravan routes that connected eastern Africa to the Indian Ocean.

BAOBAB (Bridging Ancient Origins and Biocultural Aspects of Baobab Trees) - Ongoing

imagery of baobab trees from a drone — Zanzibar Mapping Initiative (ZMI) drone images showing examples of baobab tree visibility in Zanzibar in four different meteorological seasons, and a map showing the seasonal distribution of all 238 ZMI images (Alders et al. 2025)

I have ongoing collaborations related to my research on remote sensing and detection of African baobab trees, their status as an anthropogenic legacy of ancient and historical eastern African coastal societies, their conservation, and their role in rural sustainability in the present. Recently, my work on human-baobab tree entanglements was featured in The Conversation, based on a paper I published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

CALOR (Dynamic Coasts and Landscapes of Resilience) - Ongoing

Survey up the Pangani River by boat, 2026.

With grants from the American Philosophical Society, the African Research Universities Alliance, and National Geographic, I am co-directing (with Ioana Dumitru, University of Sydney, and Elinaza Mjema, University of Dar Es Salaam) field research at the nexus of the Indian Ocean and one Tanzania’s largest rivers, the Pangani. This research is investigating how ancient Swahili communities adapted to extreme environmental conditions, like floods, droughts, and a potential tsunami event that struck Pangani Bay around 1000 CE. My co-director Ioana Dumitru runs a fantastic Instagram account for this project, or check out our project website.

ZURCP (Zanzibar Urban-Rural Complexity Project) and IZAS (Inland Zanzibar Archaeological Survey), 2016-2024

Recording stone tombs south of Zanzibar Stone Town in 2024.

From 2016 to 2024, I directed archaeological field surveys and excavations on Unguja Island in Zanzibar, Tanzania, to investigate landscape change and settlement transformations around Zanzibar Stone Town, one of the largest and longest-lasting urban centers on the Swahili Coast. This work occurred during my PhD at UC Berkeley, as well as while I was a National Science Foundation Fellow at the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies at the University of Arkansas. My research demonstrated the deep history of Indigenous adaptations to marginal environments in Zanzibar that enabled participation in Indian Ocean exchange systems, overturning colonial narratives about the pristine wilderness of areas that later became plantations. These projects recorded over a hundred new archaeological sites in Zanzibar, and also provided significant training and support for Zanzibari students and heritage officers. Publications related to this work appear in the African Archaeological Review, the Journal of Computer Applications for Archaeology, the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, the Journal of Field Archaeology, the Journal of Archaeological Research, and Current Anthropology.

Last updated August 2026 by Wolfgang Alders