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 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.

I have just begun a Marie-Skłodowska Curie (MSCA) postdoctoral fellowship at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at Cambridge University. I recently finished lecturing at the UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, following postdocs at the University of Arkansas and New York University. 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.

Projects

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

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

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

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), 2016-2023

From 2016 to 2023, I directed archaeological field surveys and excavations on Unguja Island in Zanzibar, Tanzania, to investigate urban emergence, change, and colonial 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.

Why Africa?

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, were dominated by environmental factors, or were outside of the global circuits of exchange that produced the modern world. 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 within world history, to help address challenges of the African and global present.

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.

Last updated August 2026 by Wolfgang Alders