Great Zimbabwe, and an Archaeology That Was Suppressed

Great Zimbabwe, built in dry stone without mortar between roughly the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, was the capital of a state trading gold and ivory to the Indian Ocean coast, and it gave the modern country its name. Its conical tower, its enclosures and its carved soapstone birds are the best known monuments in southern Africa.

Its interpretation is one of the clearest cases anywhere of archaeology bent to politics. Early European visitors attributed the site to Phoenicians, to Arabs or to the Queen of Sheba. Gertrude Caton-Thompson's excavation in 1929 established that it was African in origin, medieval in date, and built by the ancestors of the people living around it. Peter Garlake's later work confirmed and extended that conclusion, and he left Rhodesia over it, because the government of the day instructed museum staff not to state publicly that the site was African.

Robert Soper's survey of the Nyanga terraces records a second and quite different landscape of stone built agriculture in the eastern highlands. Great Zimbabwe was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1986. Several of its soapstone birds were removed during the colonial period, and their recovery has been a national question since independence, one of them having been returned from Germany in 2003.