1990; Wright 1984), and they maintained trading contact with the East African coast. Early settlements with stone mosques, for example, at Sima on Anjouan, developed into a network of stone-built trading towns. In northwestern Madagascar, traces of human activity occur from ca. a.d. 770.

A number of settlements were established, and these were at first called trading échelles by Pierre Vérin (1986) and later discussed in terms of being towns and city-states or part of larger states (Vérin 1992). At Mahilaka in Ampisindava Bay, one such settlement, established ca. a.d. 900, grew to be a large walled town greater than twenty hectares in extent in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Mahilaka maintained extensive trading contacts and had an estimated population of 3,500 before it declined in the fifteenth century (Radimilahy 1998).

The Southern Swahili Coast

Far to the south, in Mozambique, a series of publications concerning work on Portuguese remains on the Sofala coast was produced by, among others, G. Liesegang (1972) and L. Barradas (1967). Further north, a number of Swahili towns and settlements have been recognized, particularly in the Querimba archipelago at Ilha de Mocambique, near Nacala (Duarte 1993), and at Angoche. Farming community sites of the coastal area and interior of Nampula have been extensively investigated, particularly by Adamowicz (Sinclair et al. 1993).

In Vilanculos Bay, the Bazaruto Islands provided safe settlement locations, such as at Ponta Dundo, while on the mainland, where the River Govuro runs parallel to the coast, a settlement and trading entrepôt developed at Chibuene. From at least about a.d. 650, Chibuene maintained contacts deep into the interior, furnishing imported pottery and glass beads from the Persian Gulf as far as Palapye in eastern Botswana and there is evidence of extensive ironworking activities at Chibuene (Kiyaga Mulindwa 1992; Sinclair 1982, 1987). Later, the settlements along the Mozambique coast played an important role in linking the states of the Zimbabwean plateau with Kilwa and other Swahili trading cities.

The Swahili settlements were established initially as small local farming and fishing villages at a number of different places along the coast and the offshore islands. With the growth of overseas trade and the consolidation of internal production sectors, they underwent major expansion until they culminated in the Muslim towns of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Although most settlements remained small villages, several towns expanded greatly in size and population. The larger towns exceeded ten hectares and had buildings of coral rag stone and wood-and-daub houses. Examples of classic Swahili cut coral architecture are best known from spectacular major sites such as Kilwa and Gedi, but they occur more widely. The settlements were small by modern standards, and even at their peak, in the fifteenth century, few were larger than twenty hectares. Their populations must have been small; for example, in the fourteenth century, the important town of Shanga had 220 masonry houses within seven hectares and an estimated population of 3,000 (Horton 1996, 58).

The main towns developed into city-states and had very little political control over their hinterlands. These major towns, from the Lamu archipelago, Ungwana on Tana, Malindi, Gedi, Mombasa, and Tongoni, as well as the towns on the southern Tanzanian coast and islands of Zanzibar and Pemba, represented larger population centers on a quite densely populated coast with numerous smaller villages in between. Initial investigations of parameters of settlement location and a spatial analysis of settlement size by J. De V. Allen (1980) and T. Wilson (1982) established a site hierarchy, which is still in use today, consisting of isolated structures, hamlets, and small settlements of less than 2.5 hectares; medium-sized sites occupying about 2.5 to 5 hectares; larger stone town sites 5–15 hectares in size; and town sites greater than 15 hectares. The Comoros apparently had similar urban networks, and in northern Madagascar, at least one of the coastal settlements, Mahilaka, grew into a large, walled urban settlement with extensive trading contacts with other parts of the western Indian Ocean system.