Great Zimbabwe

A plateau capital

Great Zimbabwe lies on the Zimbabwe Plateau near present-day Masvingo. Radiocarbon dates and imported goods show the site was settled in the 11th century and rose to economic prominence between the 12th and 15th centuries, according to archaeologist Tawanda Mukwende of Great Zimbabwe University, writing for the Metropolitan Museum. Its central built area covers about 80 hectares, and at its peak it may have housed some 20,000 people. It is the largest of more than 500 stone-walled sites across Zimbabwe, Botswana, Mozambique and South Africa.

Architecture

The site has three main parts. The Hill Complex, on a granite hilltop, holds walled enclosures linked by narrow passages and is regarded as the royal quarter. Below it lie the Valley enclosures and the Great Enclosure, an elliptical structure from the 14th century with a conical tower. Its outer wall, built of fitted granite blocks without mortar, runs about 252 metres around and rises up to 11 metres, making it the largest precolonial structure in sub-Saharan Africa. Eight carved soapstone birds found at the site, most of them in the Hill Complex, are thought to have been symbols of royal and religious authority; the Zimbabwe Bird is now the national emblem.

Trade

The city's wealth came from gold and ivory traded toward the Indian Ocean coast. Excavations recovered glass beads and porcelain from China and Persia, and UNESCO notes a coin from Kilwa on the Swahili coast. Great Zimbabwe's influence declined in the late 15th century as the Khami state to the southwest grew stronger.

Colonial denial

From the late 19th century, European writers refused to credit Africans with the site. The German explorer Karl Mauch, who saw it in 1871, linked it to the biblical Queen of Sheba. Theodore Bent, on an expedition backed by Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company in 1891, attributed it to builders from Arabia or Phoenicia. Richard Hall, hired to conserve the ruins, credited "more civilized races" and stripped away deposits that held evidence of African occupation.

Archaeology overturned these claims. David Randall-MacIver judged the dwellings to be African and medieval, and in 1931 Gertrude Caton-Thompson reported that all the evidence fit a Bantu origin and medieval date. Even so, NOVA reports that the white-minority Rhodesian government of the 1960s and 1970s suppressed scholars who said Africans built the site, and archaeologist Peter Garlake was forced to leave the country.

Builders and legacy

Archaeologists and UNESCO today attribute Great Zimbabwe to the ancestors of the Shona, a Bantu-speaking people. Other groups, including the Venda and the Lemba, also hold traditions linking their ancestors to the site. At independence in 1980, the new nation took the name Zimbabwe from it.