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The Zimbabwe Ruins, located 27 km southeast of Masvingo in Zimbabwe, constitute the most impressive Iron age site in Southern Africa. Occupied by iron-using farmers as early as AD 300, Zimbabwe eventually became an important religious and trading center that flourished between 950 and 1450. Its elaborate stone-built ruins extend over an area of about 60 acres. The earliest site of occupation lies on a low, boulder-covered hill called the Acropolis. The western enclosure of the Acropolis has yielded traces of five occupation periods. The earliest, of simple Iron Age farmers, flourished in the 4th century AD. The conical amongst the ruins pictured here. |
Karanga peoples settled on the Acropolis about 950, building the first stone-walled enclosures there about 50 years later, as they began to expand their trading activities.
| The earliest site of occupation lies on a low, boulder-covered hill called the Acropolis. The western enclosure of the Acropolis has yielded traces of five occupation periods. The earliest, of simple Iron Age farmers, flourished in the 4th century AD. Karanga peoples settled on the Acropolis about 950, building the first stone-walled enclosures there about 50 years later, as they began to expand their trading activities. |
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By about 1200, Zimbabwe was occupied by prominent Karanga chiefs, who erected in the valley below the Acropolis the immense elliptical structure known as the Great Enclosure. The great freestanding outer wall of granite blocks, more than 244 m long and up to 9.8 m high, enclosed large huts, compounds, and a mysterious conical tower. Zimbabwe's rulers bartered copper and gold from mines under their control with traders from the east African coast. Fine metal ornaments of African manufacture as well as imported glass beads and Chinese porcelain litter the deposits of the site. Among artifacts with probable ritual significance found at Zimbabwe are female fertility figurines and carved soapstone birds perched on pillars.
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After its eclipse (c.1450) as a commercial center, Zimbabwe was sporadically occupied until shortly before its discovery by European explorers during the 1860s. First excavated (1891) by the British archaeologist Theodore Bent, the site was later ransacked by Richard Hall, a British government official who attempted to prove that it had been built by a foreign civilization, not by Africans. The British archaeologists David Randall-MacIver and Gertrude Caton-Thompson carried out scientific excavations in 1905 and 1929, respectively. They demonstrated Zimbabwe's indigenous African origins. A Rhodesian archaeological team reexcavated (1958) the site to obtain accurate radiocarbon dates. Another picture of the conical and main wall. |