Clarifying Coral Harvesting for Historical Swahili Monuments

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Swahili architecture is well known for its grand structures, often constructed using carved, live-harvested coral. Research has been sparse on the practices of coral harvesting despite coral’s importance for the medieval Swahili and for reef ecosystems. To clarify the potential impacts of coral harvesting, the authors collected survey data on the amount of live-harvested coral used in Swahili monuments in northern coastal Kenya. These data are combined here with oral histories—collected from elders in northern coastal Kenya who were harvesting coral until as recently as about 50 years ago—to present a new and more complete understanding of how coral harvesting has been carried out in historical Swahili towns. Understanding the co-evolution of Swahili harvesting practices, monument building, and how coral harvesting may have impacted the marine environment in the past and present allows a deeper understanding of the importance of human resource use in marine environments in both the short- and long-term. The next phase of research on this project will compare the use of live-harvested coral between different Swahili city-states and the specific ecological impacts these practices have had on local reefs.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53933