Abstract The Swahili coast of Eastern Africa has been home to an urban tradition for over a thousand years. Since the seventh century ce , sites along this coast have been trading across the Indian Ocean with partners in the Islamic world. These sites developed into stonetowns, characterized by a vernacular architectural tradition that used coral and lime and flourished from Somalia to Mozambique, from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries. The successors of this urban tradition are the modern towns of Zanzibar, Lamu, and Mombasa, which share many features with precolonial towns and have been used as analogues of past societies. This entry reviews the character of urbanism on the Swahili coast, touching on historical, archaeological, and linguistic evidence. The history of research is also discussed, together with early colonial visions of the Swahili coast and the ways these have been debunked in modern scholarship. Finally, more recent movements in the archaeology of the Swahili coast are presented – such as the move to consider towns within their regions and the archaeologists' attempt to reconstruct daily life in early towns.