Taking Historical Archaeology to the Kenyan Coast, ca 1300 A.D. Allison Mickel Introduction Until recently, most scholars of Chesapeake history believed that Africans, when brought to the New World, abandoned their traditions in favor of the dominant —and implicitly better— Anglo-American customs and beliefs. 1 e prejudice inherent in this approach, known as the acculturation model, has been recognized and criticized in recent years. e theory of acculturation has been widely abandoned in favor of creolization, a process in which multiple cultures mix and reformulate. e outcome in these circumstances is something entirely new. Deetz defines it as “the interaction between two or more cultures to produce an integrated mix which is diff erent from its antecedents.” 2 In the Chesapeake, Africans, Native Americans, and the English settlers each encountered their particular tangible cultural products and abstract systems of meaning. eir interactions and experiences with each other allowed them to borrow both industrial and theoretical ideas from each other. In doing so, they would influence and change the concepts they were using —and bring these altered ideas and products back into the cultural arena to be adopted and adapted by the other cultural players in the Chesapeake. Over time, this feedback system created an amalgamation of products and symbols from the originally distinct cultural groups. While this amalgamated, creolized culture was not practiced in a pure form by any unified group of people, it represented a new, albeit abstract, culture that contributed to cultural interaction in the Chesapeake as effectively as any of the original participants. e discourse surrounding culture formation on the Swahili coast has undergone a similar transformation. e Swahili coast is a narrow stretch of land extending from the coastline in the south of Somalia to ALLISON MICKEL is a junior at the College of William and Mary majoring in Anthropology and minoring in Linguistics. She would like to thank Dr. Chapurukha Kusimba, Dr. Neil Norman, Dr. Marley Brown, the Charles Center, and her family. She conducted firsthand research for this project in Kenya. She captured all photographs contained herein.