The ruins of Gedi are a historical and archaeological site near the Indian Ocean coast of eastern Kenya. The site is adjacent to the town of Gedi, also known as Gede in the Kilifi County. Gediis one of many medieval Swahili-Arab coastal settlements that stretch from Mogadishu, Somalia to the Zambezi River in Mozambique. There are 116 known Swahili sites stretching from southern Somalia to Vumba Kuu at the Kenya-Tanzania border.Since the rediscovery of the Gedi ruins by colonialists in the 1920s, Gedi has been one of the most intensely excavated and studied of those sites.
The site of Gedi includes a walled town and its outlying area. All of the standing buildings at Gedi, which include mosques, a palace, and numerous houses, are made from stone, are one-story, and are distributed unevenly in the town. There are also large open areas in the settlement which contained earth and thatch houses. Stone "pillar tombs" are a distinctive type of Swahili Coast architecture found at Gedi as well.
Gedi's location along the coast and association with similar sites along the Swahili Coast made it an important trade center. Although there are few historical documents specifically associating Gedi with Indian Ocean trade, the site is thought to have been one of the most important sites along the coast. Gedi'sarchitecture and an abundance of imported material culture including pottery, beads, and coins provide evidence of the city's rising prosperity over the course of its occupation from as early as the eleventh century to its abandonment in the early seventeenth century.
The Gedi ruins make up a site consisting of 45 acres that lies in the primeval Arabuko-Sokoke Forest. The ancient town at Gediis divided by two walls, with an outer wall and an inner wall.Within the inner wall there are two mosques, a palace or Sheikh's house, four large houses, several clustered houses, and four large pillar tombs comprising the urban core. The inner wall also encloses four other houses and three other mosques. Between the inner and outer walls few stone structures have been identified with the exception of two mosques. Immediately beyond the outer wall there is one mosque and several other unidentified structures.
In addition to being divided by the inner and outer walls, which created an urban core occupied by the site's foremost buildings and areas of occupation between and outside of the outer wall, Gedi has a well-established infrastructure. Gedi's structures appear to be formally arranged in accordance with streets laid out in a grid pattern. Additionally the site contained sumps to collect storm water and lavatories in many of its primary buildings.
The majority of Gedi's structures were domestic residences made of thatched-roofed mud buildings concentrated between the outer and inner walls; however, the only buildings that survived to the present were constructed using coral stones extracted from the Indian Ocean. Although several of the buildings predate the fourteenth century, coral became a more common construction material for important structures and elite residences during that time period. All of the buildings at Gediare single-story structures. The walls and other coral structures were constructed in a similar manner using lime mortar, with most foundations no greater than one foot in depth and filled with stones. Where foundations were used, they tended to be no wider than the wall they supported. There are several examples of non-utilitarian design elements. Doorways for the buildings consist of square framed pointed archways, with tombs and mosques containing spandrels and architraves that have been carved or inlaid with porcelain.
Excavations at Gedi have uncovered numerous artifacts, but the most abundant and commonly discussed in literature are beads and ceramics, which have been used to identify trade and to obtain dates for the site's occupation. Many of the names given to the stone houses refer to the objects found within or in association with them including two Chinese coins, a porcelain bowl, scissors, a Venetian Bead, cowrie shells, an iron lamp, and an iron box. The material remains found at Gedi have been found to be similar to the remains at adjacent Swahili coastal settlements with the greatest degree of variation among the styles of pottery represented. Of eight sites examined by Kirkman, the sites of Gedi, Ungwana, and Kilepwa had nearly identical material remains prior to the fifteenth century, while the sites of Mnarani, the Pillar Tomb at Malindi, Takwa, Kinuni, and Kilindidni increasingly similar material culture over the course of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. In addition to local production, one of the major contributors to the presence of cultural materials found at the site is due to the importance of Indian Ocean trade, which assumed a growing role in East Africa at the beginning of the Islamic era in the seventh century.
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