Great Zimbabwe

Great Zimbabwe stands at the top of a granite hill in the modern nation of Zimbabwe, in the center of the Victoria District. The site consists of a stone-walled settlement composed of enclosures, towers, portals, and staircases, occupying both the hilltop and the valley below. Great Zimbabwe existed for over 500 years as a bustling center of trade and commerce, and it politically dominated the surrounding valley and plateaus. At its peak, around a.d. 1200, it was probably the largest settlement in sub-Saharan Africa (Ndoro 1994). Built by ancestors of the present Shona people, Zimbabwe derived its name from the Shona word for “houses of stone.” In 1980 Rhodesia was renamed Zimbabwe in recognition of the country’s cultural heritage.

First documented by Portuguese explorers in the sixteenth century, the site was noted for its carvings and sophisticated architecture. From the beginning of colonial contact in the nineteenth century, the city’s origins were a focus of controversy. Europeans were unwilling to recognize a connection between the impressive ruins and the indigenous Shona people of the area. Instead, explorers and excavators proposed a range of sources for Great Zimbabwe, suggesting, for example, that it was a palace of the Queen of Sheba or King Solomon or a monument built by the Phoenicians, south Indians, or Arabs. These attempts to strip the local African people of their archaeological past persisted well into the twentieth century and served as a tool in the recession efforts of the white Rhodesia Front government in the 1960s (Mahachi and Ndoro 1997).

The ruins were looted repeatedly beginning in the late 1800s in an effort to find the legendary gold of King Solomon and to carry away ornamental stonework and artifacts. Richard Hall was appointed curator of the site in 1902 and conducted large-scale, unscientific excavations that resulted in the destruction of almost all culture-bearing deposits in the stone enclosures. Later archaeologists, such as gertrude caton-thompson who excavated in the 1930s, argued that the site showed evidence of local African development and had clearly been built by indigenous inhabitants. Such views were largely ignored, however, in favor of sensationalist foreign-origin theories. Recent research supports the African Iron Age provenance of the site, and current investigations are being conducted by Zimbabwean archaeologists such as Kundishora Tungamirai Chipunza and students eager to reclaim their history.

Inhabited from a.d. 900 to 1450, Great Zimbabwe occupied an important trade position between the Zimbabwean plateau and the Indian Ocean coastline. Its wealth was derived from control of local gold and ivory production and trade of the resulting goods with Arab and Swahili merchants. The city functioned as a marketplace and trade emporium, importing such exotic items as cotton cloth, Persian glass beads, and Chinese porcelain. The political influence of the Great Zimbabwe complex extended as far as Mozambique, Botswana, and South Africa; other important contemporary sites of this Zimbabwe Tradition include Khami, Nalatale, Danamombe, and Tsindi (Chipunza 1997).

Inhabitants raised cattle, cultivated sorghum and millet (Callahan 1998), and depended on food tribute from surrounding farming communities. The center declined with the degradation of the local environment (including depletion of the soil and exhaustion of firewood sources), due to the demands of a dense urban population. The Shona inhabitants had largely abandoned the area by 1500, only to be forced back by European settlement of the more fertile and productive high plains areas during the colonial period. The widespread distribution of the Shona language over this area today gives support to the idea that a powerful trading empire was based at Great Zimbabwe in the past (Callahan 1998).

The stone walls of the hilltop complex delineate a classic African village design, containing groups of wattle-and-daub huts within each stone-walled enclosure. These would have been occupied by elite family groups associated with the settlement’s leader (Callahan 1998). The ruler lived in the uppermost enclosure, removed from the common people and proclaiming his or her power through the visible manifestation of stone walls and towers (Pwiti 1996). Architectural similarities found in other ruins on the Zimbabwe plateau indicate that Great Zimbabwe had established hegemony over a network of trading centers and gold and ivory production sources. This dominance may have been achieved by installing members of the royal family as local leaders in the outlying sites.