Great Zimbabwe

Great Zimbabwe is a stone city in southeastern Africa, in what is now Masvingo Province, Zimbabwe, built by the ancestors of the Shona people beginning around 1000 CE, with its major dry-stone construction dating mainly to the eleventh through fifteenth centuries. At its height the site covered more than seven square kilometers across three complexes, the Hill Complex, the Valley Complex and the Great Enclosure, whose eleven-meter walls were built without mortar, and supported a population estimated between ten and twenty thousand people. The site anchored a trading network reaching the Swahili coast and the Indian Ocean. Great Zimbabwe was abandoned by the sixteenth or seventeenth century; historians disagree on why, with decline in long-distance trade, depletion of local resources and exhaustion of water or grazing capacity all proposed. During white minority rule in twentieth century Rhodesia, the government officially insisted the ruins could not have been built by Africans and censored archaeologists who said otherwise; that denial has since been thoroughly rejected by the archaeological record, which is unambiguous about Shona authorship. The city's wealth came from dominating trade routes that carried gold and ivory from the Zimbabwean plateau's goldfields down to Swahili coast ports such as Sofala for the Indian Ocean trade, gold that was worked on site with clay crucibles and tools into wire, beads and ornaments, alongside a royal cattle herd that moved seasonally under the court's management; imported Chinese Longquan celadon and blue-and-white porcelain, Persian pottery and Arabian coins recovered at the site attest to the reach of that trade network. Great Zimbabwe kept no writing system of its own and relied on oral tradition; the Portuguese chronicler Joao de Barros noted in 1538 that the people of the land, being ignorant of the art of writing, left no record of their own history. The archaeologist Gertrude Caton-Thompson's 1929 excavation independently confirmed the Bantu, African origin of the ruins that the Rhodesian government continued to deny for decades afterward, and the site was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1986.