Kenya - Gedi

The Gedi ruins are at 16 km to the south of Malindi and at 6,5Km from the sea. The surface of the city of Gedi makes more than its walled perimeter, valued to 18 hectares. The whole site is estimated to 30 hectares, a surface close to the one of Pate city in the archipelago of Lamu. All these new elements indicate that Gedi was not always a vassal city but a great City-State, non mentioned or non recognized in the historic sources.

In 1927, the site is classified protected monument. The buildings threatened of collapse are restored by the Department of the public works of Kenya in 1939. Gedi is declared national park in 1948 and excavations are programmed under the direction of a British archaeologist, James Kirkman. He makes a plan of the site, clears many buildings and excavates the big mosque (1954) and the palace (1963). James Kirkman worked in Gedi during ten years, he stops his excavations in 1958. We took the excavations of the site of Gedi in 1999, to do a doctorate on the Swahili fortifications. First sustained by the Foundation of France, the mission is financed by the French Ministry of the Foreign Affairs since 2001.

The survey and the study of a city like Gedi is fundamental, so much for the African archeology that for the Islamic archeology, it is about understanding the process of islamisation on the East African coast and the formation of a coastal culture, the Swahili culture. Our approach also concerns the phenomenon of urbanization and the creation of the medieval cities of Kenya. The material culture is not disregarded, the analysis of the imported ceramics, from Arabian and Asian countries, permits to draw some links and to understand the organization of the Indian ocean trade. The inventory of the exports of local products, as ivory, copal, or crystal rock, replace the African continent in the vast commercial network of the Indian Ocean. Finally, our mission is the only French team working in this domain, abandoned to the Anglo-Saxons, that it is in Kenya, in Somalia or in Tanzania.

The mission of 2001 permitted to get a complete map of Gedi. Zones of restoration and important excavation have been defined from the new map. It is a group of monumental houses situated to the southeast of the great mosque of the XV^th century and from a very well-preserved district to the East of the house of the dhow. The survey of these oriental zones will permit to open new sectors to the public, to protect some monuments in peril by the forest and to make a balance with the western zone cleared by Kirkman in the fifties.