Great Zimbabwe is the clearest case anywhere of archaeology being bent to serve a colonial claim, and of the correction being suppressed for seventy years after it had been made.
The invention. Karl Mauch reached the ruins in 1871 and concluded immediately that Africans had not built them. He proposed the Queen of Sheba and Phoenicians, reasoning in part from a wooden lintel he decided was Lebanese cedar, it was local sandalwood. The theory was not a hypothesis he tested. It was a premise he started from.
The use. The idea was extraordinarily convenient. Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company was in the process of taking the territory, and a vanished white civilisation transformed conquest into recovery: the land had once been held by people like the settlers and was merely being reclaimed. Rhodes funded work at the site and the story was promoted energetically. Richard Nicklin Hall, appointed curator in 1902, spent two years removing what he called "the filth and decadence of Kaffir occupation", stratified archaeological deposits several feet deep, in order to reach the levels he believed a foreign civilisation had left. He destroyed the primary evidence over most of the site. It is among the most consequential acts of archaeological vandalism on record, and it was carried out by the official custodian.
The correction, twice. David Randall-MacIver excavated in 1905 and 1906 and reported that the site was African and medieval, on stratigraphy and on the imported datable goods found with local material. He was attacked. Gertrude Caton-Thompson was sent in 1929 partly in the expectation that she would overturn him. She did not: she confirmed the African origin independently and wrote that the evidence left no doubt. Two rigorous excavations, a generation apart, reached the same conclusion.
The suppression. It made no difference to official presentation for another fifty years. The Rhodesian Front government of the 1960s and 1970s required the national museum service to present the foreign-origin theory, or at minimum to give it equal standing. Guidebooks were censored and displays were altered. The archaeologist Paul Sinclair has described being told that his job depended on not stating publicly that Africans built the site. Peter Garlake, the senior inspector of monuments and author of the standard book on it, resigned and left the country. Publishing the settled scholarly conclusion was a career-ending act in Rhodesia as late as the 1970s.
The birds. Eight soapstone raptors on columns were taken from the site, mostly around 1890, and most passed into Cecil Rhodes's possession. Most have since returned to Zimbabwe. One remained at Rhodes's Cape Town house at Groote Schuur, and the lower portion of another, separated from its upper half, was returned from Germany in 2003 and reunited with it.
The answer. Zimbabwe took its name from the site at independence in 1980, and the bird stands on the national flag, the currency and the coat of arms. That is not decoration. It is a direct response to a seventy-year state project to insist that Africans could not have built the largest ancient structure in sub-Saharan Africa.