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Great Zimbabwe was the most famous of a series of dry-stone walled kingdoms located in Southeast Africa that flourished between the 12th and 16th centuries. It was both a large African metropolis and the capital of a larger kingdom, with subsidiaries linked through alliance, marriage, and tribute to its leaders. The historic kingdom’s monumental stone architecture made it the center of controversy in the colonial era and later a famous UNESCO World Heritage Site. Research into Great Zimbabwe’s history has faced the major challenges of colonial-era looting and site destruction. What is now known about Great Zimbabwe is a testament to the persistence and ingenuity of multiple generations of researchers who skillfully worked with the available archaeology, oral traditions, and travelers’ descriptions.

Great Zimbabwe was located in the southeast of the country of Zimbabwe, ap- proximately 27 kilometers from the present-day town of Masvingo. The historic kingdom’s capital was a stone-walled city that covered 1,779 acres (approximately 800 hectares) at its largest. The historic kingdom lay in the southern section of the large Zimbabwe Plateau, which was the watershed between the Zambezi and Limpopo Rivers. The plateau varied in elevation and was marked by rocky out-croppings and granite kopjes (isolated rocky hills). The general plateau environment supported a variety of microenvironments and, most important, had ideal vegetation for livestock rearing. The plateau lacked the tsetse fly, which carried the sleeping sickness disease (trypanosomiasis) that could devastate herds. Large gold deposits were also found on the plateau. This factor and the plateau’s relative proximity to the East African coast became pivotal for long-distance trade.

The word zimbabwe has been variously translated as “house of stone” or “sacred house.” More generally it refers to the widespread tradition of constructing granite stone walls without mortar in Southeast Africa. This was a tradition developed by the distant Iron Age ancestors of current Shona-language speakers, who used the original stone enclosures for protection and cattle keeping. In the area that became Great Zimbabwe, early settlements by cattle keepers and agriculturalists were dated at around 500 CE. Many consider these early inhabitants the Gokomere culture, a distant cultural and linguistic ancestor to the present-day Shona. Over time local leaders emerged, forming alliances and attracting followers with cattle and agricultural resources. Often called the Gumanye, these later inhabitants began to build substantially at Great Zimbabwe, creating pole and dhaka homes. They also began importing glass beads around 800 CE.

The rise of large hierarchical kingdoms such as Great Zimbabwe continues to be a subject of scholarly debate. Earlier views on Great Zimbabwe’s formation searched for single-factor explanations. In particular, many credited its rise to control of the long-distance gold trade with the Indian Ocean commercial world. Others offered structural explanations and suggested that the kingdom functioned as a religious center with different monuments, each having ritual roles. Political explanations were also popular where Great Zimbabwe was the capital of a royal family whose leaders through charisma or management of regional specialists (such as ironworkers) gained power.

-Great Zimbabwe, Andrea Felber Seligman in African Kingdoms, edited by Saheed Aderinto

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