纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 060基尔瓦陶器碎片（3）（在线收听）

There are a lot of bits here in this drawer in the British Museum, but the handful that I've just picked out can tell us a great deal. The largest piece is about the size of a postcard, and the smallest roughly half the size of a credit card. And the pieces fall easily into three distinct groups. There's a couple of smooth, pale green pieces that look very like modern expensive china. Then there are other small pieces with blue patterning - and then there's a third group, that are of unglazed natural clay, decorated in quite high relief. The pots that these fragments were once part of, in fact, come from widely different parts of the world, but between six and nine hundred years ago all these fragments were thrown away in one place - on the same beach in East Africa. They were found at the bottom of a low crumbling cliff at Kilwa Kisiwani island, in Tanzania.

Today Kilwa is a quiet Tanzanian island with a few small fishing villages, but around the year 1200 it was a thriving port city, and you can still find the ruins of its great stone buildings and of the largest mosque of its time in sub-Saharan Africa. A later Portuguese visitor here describes the city as he found it in 1502: