ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 turns away from issues of arrival and ecological impact to tackle the question of how far island populations developed distinctive identities of their own and how much those identities were generated through interaction between islands or between islands and adjacent mainlands. It also asks whether we can see individual island communities, or communities on particular islands, opting to avoid such interaction. These questions require a deeper consideration of the concepts of insularity and isolation and are principally explored via the networks that connected the pre-sixteenth-century Indian Ocean world, networks that frequently had African islands at their core. The archaeology of East Africa’s Swahili Coast dominates this part of the discussion, along with that of Madagascar. By way of contrast, Chapter 5 also looks in more detail at Bioko and the Canary Islands, two instances where island populations appear to have chosen isolation over connectivity. Why was this so, what forms did it take, and did those forms vary between the eight islands of the Canarian Archipelago?
