Colonial authorities pressured archaeologists to deny Africans built Great Zimbabwe.
Great Zimbabwe's mortarless stone walls, up to 11 metres high, make it the largest stone structure in precolonial southern Africa. It was built between the 11th and 15th centuries by ancestors of the Shona people. European visitors credited Phoenicians, Arabs or the Queen of Sheba instead. Scholars only reached consensus on its African origins in the 1950s.
The city lies in the hills near Masvingo in south-eastern Zimbabwe. Settled from around AD 1000, it became the capital of a kingdom from the 13th century, and construction continued for over 300 years before the site was abandoned in the 16th or 17th century. It has three main parts: the Hill Complex, the oldest; the Great Enclosure, whose curving dry-stone walls reach 11 metres; and the Valley Complex. Estimates of its peak population range from about 18,000 to 20,000, though a recent study suggests it never exceeded 10,000.
Its wealth came from trade. Great Zimbabwe controlled routes from the gold fields of the plateau to the Swahili coast, where ports such as Sofala passed gold and ivory into the Indian Ocean trade. Finds at the site include Persian bowls and Chinese celadon, as well as its most famous artefacts, eight carved soapstone birds.
Europeans reached it only in the late 19th century. The German explorer Karl Mauch, shown the ruins in 1871, dismissed any possibility that local people had built them and favoured a legend linking them to the Queen of Sheba, claiming a wooden beam must be cedar brought by Phoenicians. Looters followed, stripping the site in the 1890s and after, and the untrained excavator J. Theodore Bent worked there with Cecil Rhodes's backing. Theories crediting anyone but the Shona dominated for decades.
Real archaeology told a different story. David Randall-MacIver concluded in 1905–06 that the builders were African, and Gertrude Caton Thompson confirmed it in 1929. Yet the white government of Rhodesia later pressured archaeologists to deny African construction, because admitting it undermined the colonial idea of a 'civilising mission'. The consensus on its African origin was established only in the 1950s. When the country won independence, it took its name from the site. Great Zimbabwe is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Source: Wikipedia — Great Zimbabwe · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
