Clove plantations on nineteenth-century Zanzibar were sites on which many recent immigrants from Oman and Africa constructed new identities within the complex social relations of colonial rule, enslavement and concubinage. Archaeological evidence relating both to architectural and ceramic remains is used within this work to interpret such multifaceted identities. Ethnographic and historical accounts of African societies have both shown that gendered identities across the continent are, and have been in the past, characterized by diversity. This article has a wider significance beyond the field of African archaeology, in suggesting that archaeologists working across Africa are ideally placed to make an important contribution to the field of gender archaeology in exploring such heterogeneous subjectivities.
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