[2]: 152 The main subsistence pattern of the inhabitants of the site appeared to derive from the coast which included fish, marine mammals, and reptiles.
Manyikeni, a Zimbabwean traditional style of stone walled settlement 10 km west of Chibuene, possibly gained control of the site after AD 1200.
Throughout the course of the occupation of Chibuene, the inhabitants practiced a broad subsistence economy with the utilization of domestic animals, marine fauna, and wild plant life to augment agricultural production.
The 1995 excavations from a Swedish sponsored team revealed a rather high proportion of fish remains in comparison to sites in South Africa.
The poor soil composition and inadequate rainfall only allowed variable agricultural output, causing the inhabitants to procure other means of sustenance.
Chibuene inhabitants made use of domesticated animals from southern Africa and successful shark and turtle hunting practices from neighbors from the north in order to adequately exploit the resources of the particular region they inhabited with easy access to the coast and variable land for pasturage in addition to invaluable trade resources procured from the Indian Ocean trade network.
[3]: 28 Trade played an important role in this period for procuring valuable commodities such as glass and additional food stuffs.
Faunal assemblages revealed much more of an emphasis on cattle herding in these early years, although not on a large-scale due to the low availability of pastoral lands.
[3]: 28 Chibuene remained an important location for trade on a regional level, but the site declined in population with the inhabitants scattering further into the interior.
Furthermore, the climactic composition of the region largely remained the same as the previous occupation with sparse and unreliable rainfall, combined with low nutrient soil, further suggesting a relationship.
Domesticated animals such as cattle, sheep, and goats remain in the faunal assemblages, suggesting their continued use as a buffer during periods of lower agricultural production.
The region surrounding Chibuene through the course of its occupation was a site of dramatic transformations of vegetation cover and climactic shifts.
Pollen diagrams deriving from the surrounding lakes of Nhaucati and Xiroche revealed extensive landscape transformations from riverine forests to mostly savannah in the present day.
[3]: 25 As a result, the individual inhabitants employed a variety of adaptive strategies in order to procure adequate resources for survival.
These included agriculture, keeping of domesticated animals, collecting of wild plant food stuff, and making use of their position close to the coast by exploiting marine flora and fauna.
[1]: 72 In this time frame, Chibuene was a very important gateway linking the coast to the interior, but sometime at the end of the first millennium its role dramatically decreased in the Indian Ocean trade network.
Contemporaneously, sites further north, particularly Unguja Ukuu on Zanzibar and Tumbe on Pemba Island experienced a similar decline and trade and period of abandonment.
[1]: 72 The earliest ceramics in the lowest levels of occupation contained a distinct pottery style, most associated with early agriculturalists in southern Africa.
Contained in the artefact assemblage were two fragments of light blue glaze on a buff body found in the lowest occupation in addition to small sherds of similar type.
The unglazed ware at the site contained motifs ranging from triangles, oblique and horizontal lines, cross hatching, zigzags, and herringbone, typically across the rim, neck, or shoulder of the vessels.
Written sources in from the fifteenth century revealed that ivory, animal skins and slaves were traded for glass beads.
[4]: 385 In archaeological surveys performed between 1995 and 2001 from the lower levels of occupation (600-1000 AD), 2800 beads were collected from the site with the vast majority being of the Zhizo tradition and the discovery of a new typology, named the Chibuene series.