Sloan R Williams

Associate Professor

College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Department of Anthropology

Research Interests

I am currently interested in working with undergraduates on two projects that focus on the genetic relationships among modern and ancient people from southeastern and coastal Kenya.
1) The first project involves the study of the Mijikenda and Taita people using Y chromosome markers. We are establishing the biological relationships between these groups in order to understand how this area was settled. We will also assess the impact that the caravan networks of the ancient Swahili empire had on these two groups. The coastal Swahili brought goods from the interior of Africa with the help of these two groups and traded them to other parts of the Indian Ocean. We may find genetic traces of their Arab or Indian trading partners in the modern African groups we study.
2) The second project focuses on the history and origins of the Swahili people using genetic data obtained from skeletons buried at two Swahili archaeological sites. The student would sequence the mitochondrial HVRI and compare the haplogroups with modern African populations.

The URE website is only for undergraduate student researchers.