British Institute in Eastern Africa Digital Archives: John Sutton Collection
British Institute in Eastern Africa, John E G Sutton, 2024. https://doi.org/10.5284/1117706. How to cite using this DOI
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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Resource identifiers
- ADS Collection: 4420
- DOI:https://doi.org/10.5284/1117706
- How to cite using this DOI
Introduction
The British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA) John Sutton Archive is one of a series of Collections from the BIEA. The main page for this series can be accessed from the menu on the left.
This collection contains digitised versions of 35 mm colour transparencies from John Sutton's work in East Africa from 1960s to the 1990s. The collection is disseminated as organised by John Sutton which is primarily by site or theme. Occasionally under- or over-exposed shots are included for the record faute de mieux, knowing that they cannot be repeated.
Many of these photographs are unrepeatable now and provide a valuable historical record, particularly for the house styles in Tanzania, where the government's ujamaa (villagisation) programme of the 1970s transformed both settlement location patterns and, equally, the configuration of compounds and the shapes, materials and methods of house-building in many districts.
The recording was not a planned exercise and essentially arose from John Sutton's concern to understand the construction arrangements of the Sirikwa hollows of the western Kenya highlands and to test the theory of Louis Leakey in particular (discounted as a result) of a connection with the sunken flat-roofed tembe houses of the Iraqw of Mbulu district. From that the interest expanded, but not in a comprehensive or systematic way, brief stops being made here and there while on safari for different archaeological purposes. Some shots show little more than a house's shape and size, without much context (though more information, especially about construction details, was recorded in notebooks not available in this collection). That notwithstanding, the archiving of these dated photographs may prove helpful for rather different anthropological or historical enquiries.
The two groups – the East African Coast Swahili Sites and Stone Age/Palaeontological Sites – do not arise from John Sutton own research and have mainly been compiled for teaching purposes. Kilwa in particular, results from John Sutton assisting Neville Chittick throughout his excavation season of 1962 (following the British 'schools' tradition for research students), and return visits on periodic occasions.
Basic published references are included in the photo index for sections (and occasionally specific sites or details). For John Sutton's work, there are guides to further background and references in:
Sutton, J.E.G. 1990. A Thousand Years of East Africa. Nairobi: British Institute in Eastern Africa.Sutton, J.E.G. (ed) 1998. Archaeological sites of East Africa: four studies, ANZANIA XXXIII. Nairobi: British Institute in Eastern Africa.
