DE-M P HE G Z ING S M O T O Awps.prenhall.com/wps/media/objects/12330/12626747/myanthropol… · lost biblical city of Ophir—the site of King Solomon’s mines. The history of archaeology

DE-MYSTIFYING THE PAST:THE GREAT ZIMBABWE,

KING SOLOMON’S MINES,AND OTHER TALES

OF OLD AFRICA

Joseph O. Vogel

Research TOC

On the high granite plateau between the Zambezi andLimpopo rivers, in southeast Africa, there stretches a broadplain of semiarid savanna woodlands. This is the homeland

of the Shona-speaking people and the site of some two hundredzimbabwes. These stone-built structures range in size from low cir-cular walls enclosing small farming hamlets to multiroomed familycompounds and large complexly constructed towns. GreatZimbabwe is the largest of these southeast African towns—a spa-cious complex of granite-blocked freestone masonry buildingsspread out over a broad patch of hilltop and valley in southeastZimbabwe.

The site of Great Zimbabwe was first occupied sometime in thesixth century by a subsistence farming community. In the thirteenthcentury its residents raised the first simple stone-walling and sun-dried clay platforms for their pole-and-sun-dried clay walledhouses. Soon thereafter construction started on the finest, most elab-orate buildings built there. By this time it was a large, populoustown of eighteen thousand inhabitants, with a great many pole-and-sun-dried clay-walled houses and elaborate stone-walled buildings.A large multiroomed compound on the steep-sided rocky hilltopused well-coursed freestone masonry to link the natural bouldersinto a series of enclosures. Two narrow, high-walled freestonemasonry passages with sections of sun-dried clay stairs formed theascent from the valley. In the valley below were large free-standingenclosures built open to the sky, around pole-and-sun-dried-clayhouses joined by short lengths of walling. Each of the enclosures wasdivided into a maze of individual family compounds.

Though Great Zimbabwe was the best known and largest ofthe southeast African towns, it was only one of many importantcivic centers. There were magnificent towns in southwestZimbabwe at Khami, Naletale, and Dhlo Dhlo. The rocky hills ofZimbabwe rise in stark contrast to the surrounding plain. EliteShona families chose to exalt their social prominence by buildingfamily compounds atop these hills, which they decorated withmassive, elaborately decorated terracing and narrow masonryascents. These towns present an impressive panorama of finelycoursed stone-walling decorated with bands of inset blocks set inchevron patterns. In northeast Zimbabwe, on the other hand, thereare hundreds of miles of stone-built agricultural terraces, the foun-dations of semisubterranean houses and channels designed tomove water from place to place.

It seems hard to believe that for a long time the authorship ofthese monumental sites was in doubt. Given the profusion ofstone-built structures, why was there ever a doubt that monumen-

3

tal architecture was the product of local African cultures?Archaeology spent more than a century caught up in cultural poli-tics associated with interpreting the past in southeast Africa. Thefirst European travelers into southeast Africa believed the stone-walling and evidence of mining to be relics of Near Eastern civi-lization. In fanciful reconstructions of life in Great Zimbabwe, writ-ers of fiction depicted the people there as mining gold to export tothe great markets of the Near East, while farming East Africa tosupport a vast colonial enterprise.1

Why did such a story take hold of the popular imagination?Why were the sites not seen as the product of African ingenuity?Though Great Zimbabwe was well known, along with many otherstone-built sites, analysis of the problem of the monumental archi-tecture of southeast Africa started with armchair speculation andthe assumption that Africans did not build in stone. In the 1890s,when the era of archaeological investigation at the monumentalsites began, it did not start with the same attitudes that a modernarchaeologist brings to the study of African culture. The first inves-tigators asked, “Which ancient Near Eastern civilization migratedto southern Africa and left these fabulous lost cities?”2

These places became generally known to Europeans in themid-nineteenth century, when a self-taught geologist, Carl Mauch,prospecting the interior of South Africa in 1871, reached GreatZimbabwe. Excited by Mauch’s good luck, European geographersposited a connection between this site in southeast Africa and thelost biblical city of Ophir—the site of King Solomon’s mines. Thehistory of archaeology in southeast Africa is one of supplantingsuch “fanciful” ideas about the history of Africa with the results ofobjective science.

Because of their lack of scientific method and their racial preju-dices, many Europeans at the time saw ample reason to doubt theAfrican genesis of monumental architecture. They had no regardfor the antiquity or subtlety of African culture, believing that thelocal African people were latecomers to the territory. An Nguniarmy escaping the reach of Shaka had recently ravaged the coun-try, and as a result of the general disruption of settled life in south-ern Africa following the Zulu wars early in the nineteenth century,Great Zimbabwe was deserted.

A trader and hunter, Willy Posselt, visited Great Zimbabwe in1889 and discovered its first important artifacts: carved soapstonebird figures atop tall granite pillars. Commentators in Europe com-pared these figures to sculpture from the Near East. Modern

4 RESEARCH FRONTIERS

Figure 1Great Zimbabwe as it looked to Carl Mauch in 1871, emphasizingthe hilltop structures and the Great Enclosure in the lower right. Thesketch plan locates the enclosures upon the central hill and the clut-ter of compounds around the Great Enclosure.

5DE-MYSTIFYING THE PAST

archaeologists, transcending naive comparisons, defining culturalcontexts, and utilizing more objective and scientific studies ofAfrican culture, now know that the carvings are African icons sym-

bolizing the mediation of chiefs. Earlier observers only recognizedthe figures as birds, which they then compared to exotic birds theyalready knew, with no regard for a proper cultural setting to vali-date their debate.

The next year, adventurers sponsored by Cecil Rhodes enteredand seized Mashonaland, taking time on their ride north to stopand play tourist at Great Zimbabwe. The newspapers headlinedthe discovery of ruins in a wild land, fostering the myth of KingSolomon’s mines, not because of an interest in archaeology but tosupport the stock of the company then developing the colony ofRhodesia.

EARLY ARCHAEOLOGICAL

INVESTIGATIONS

In 1891 the English archaeologist J. Theodore Bent made the firstfield investigations at Great Zimbabwe. Bent incorrectly decided,based on reference to ancient cultures already known to nineteenth-century archaeology, that the zimbabwes were three-thousand-year-old fortifications, remnants of a mining colony from SouthernArabia. Having travelled to southeast Africa to locate a lost NearEastern civilization, he satisfied himself that he had discovered one.

Bent’s methods were typical of the time in that they ignoredthe logical implications of objective observations. In contrast, asearly as the mid-1870s an anthropologist and advocate of a morescientific method, Robert Hartmann, correctly attributed the monu-mental sites to African builders. In his travels in northeast Africahe had observed many examples of African stone-built architec-ture; it was therefore reasonable to assume that the abandonedtowns in southeast Africa were also of African origin.3 Unlike Bent,he did not attempt to make his observations fit some preconceivedexplanation. As we shall see, anthropological archaeology goesbeyond a description of objects and naive kinds of explanation; ituses cogent models of cultural behavior to give meaning to ourinvestigations of the past.

The first research of a modern kind, using both stratigraphicmethods and an understanding of typological analysis, took place in1905. An archaeologist trained in the stringent methods ofEgyptology, David Randall-MacIver, excavated at Great Zimbabwe


and some other stone-built sites. He questioned the idea that thesebuildings were built by non-Africans. Unlike Bent with his vaguekinds of comparison, Randall-MacIver excavated beneath the foun-dations of the stone buildings in order to determine the construc-tion sequence and closely studied potsherds to fix the sequence ofpottery and other artifacts associated with their construction. Hefound nothing that could be associated with the ancient Near Eastand much that was paralleled in African culture. Because the tradeitems located by Randall-MacIver could be dated to the fourteenthor fifteenth century, he posited a medieval date for the occupationrather than one of great antiquity.4 Further research by GertrudeCaton-Thompson in the late 1920s confirmed Randall-MacIver’sconclusions that the sites were African and less than a thousandyears old.5

MORE RECENT

ARCHAEOLOGICAL INVESTIGATIONS

Though the archaeology was clear and the major sites were investi-gated, a tendency to deny the African origins of these sitesremained an active part of popular discussions of African history.As a result, archaeologists in the 1950s and 1960s labored to evalu-ate the sites as parts of African history. They surveyed, mapped,and recorded many sites in the countries now called Zimbabweand Mozambique, describing them in detail. At the same time, his-torians collected information about them and the generations ofShona-speaking Karanga who built them. In the 1960s and 1970sarchaeologists discovered the 1,600-year-old hamlets of the firstfarming communities to settle the southern savanna.

With the discovery of the ancient roots of African society, oldideas about the local Africans as latecomers were cast aside. Newstrategies for interpreting the history of the monumental sites weredevised, using a wide-ranging body of anthropological, historical,and archaeological data, as well as information found elsewhere.This was necessary because many early excavations at the majorsites were treasure-hunting expeditions or misguided efforts toremove cultural deposits to clear passages for tourists. When I firstvisited the Khami site outside Bulawayo, K. R. Robinson, who hadrecently conducted first-class investigations there, pointed out


mounds of earth created by treasure seekers in the 1890s. Here andthere bits of pottery were eroding out of the soil, all context lost.The very heart of an archaeological investigation, the accumulatedtrash and sweepings of human activity, was dug up, found want-ing in value and cast away. Even worse, the integrity of thedeposits was compromised. It was no longer possible to discerncontext or assign provenance (the location as well as the associa-tions) of things found buried in these spoil heaps.

Some investigators early in the twentieth century had miscon-strued the stratigraphy at Great Zimbabwe and its allied towns inorder to portray a sequence that began with the most polished ofbuilding methods. They wished to imply that the building tech-niques were imported into southeast Africa in an advanced stage.They argued that there was no evidence of the local developmentof fine building techniques, but a gradual decay associated with acivilization degenerating from contact with people native to theregion. The building sequence and a proper application of stratig-raphy was first dealt with in the late 1920s and later by RogerSummers and his colleagues in the 1950s.6 But there is a lesson tobe learned: Explanation in archaeology is a slippery process. Anypreconceived idea of the meaning of archaeological remains or thefailure to adhere to proper procedure seriously undermines thevalidity of judgments.

Nevertheless, there were many questions to be asked about thepeople who had once lived at places like Great Zimbabwe. If themajor sites were disturbed, how could archaeology find answers?As archaeology progressed in southern Africa, researchers pursuedthe problem of the rise of complex society in novel ways, investi-gating when the first farmers arrived in southeast Africa, how theymanaged crop production, the nature of their political life, andhow they managed the economics of trade. This was necessary inorder to reconstruct the lifeways of the societies that once domi-nated life on the plateau.

The apologists of the colonial period described Africans as sim-ple tribal folk who, having progressed to hoe-agriculture and ironworking, failed to achieve any higher level of cultural achievement.To those of us living and working in southeast Africa, it wasapparent that the basis of African society was more involved andintricate than this. We began a process of reconstructing the truehistory of Africa—a history that colonial governments said did notexist. Africa ceased to be a continent without history as archaeolo-gists discovered a new world transcending politics and prejudice.


FIELD ARCHAEOLOGY AND INQUIRY

IN SOUTHEASTERN AFRICA

How does one go about reconstructing the history of people wholeave no written record? I explored old farming settlements in theVictoria Falls region of the Zambezi valley for over ten years. Myintention was not to study a few sites, but to coordinate a wide-ranging areal survey that would permit me to understand whenAfrican farmers first came into this part of the Zambezi valley andhow they adapted to living there. My field work was designed toproduce a long sequence of sites, ranging in time from the firstfarmers of the sixth century to settlements of the nineteenth cen-tury. The development of such a sequence required extensive fieldsurveys and investigations at a variety of sites. Southern Zambia isunique in southeast Africa for its stratified middens. That is, manyvillage sites were reoccupied over long periods of time, leaving adeposit layered into levels, each of which represents an episode ofoccupation at that location. As a result, I separated the different vil-lage horizons and associated changes in the pottery and iron toolsinto a time-series. Having determined the sequence at one midden,I compared it with the sequence observed elsewhere at anotherstratified site. Levels missing at one site could be found elsewhereand placed into proper sequence.7

But what if we want to go beyond patterns of change andexplore the social life of an ancient hamlet? To this end, I investi-gated single component sites, which showed only a single occupa-tion, in order to determine the layout of hamlets. In many places insouthern Africa, settlements are laid out around a central cattleenclosure. This is a place where men gather to discuss matters ofcommon interest and therefore is a place of political prominence.While claims on land are held in mutual trust within lineages, cat-tle are the private property of men, used to underwrite politicalalliances with men of other lineages and mark personal prestige.Because cattle-ownership is important to the structure of manysouthern African societies, locating a cattle enclosure suggests thesignificance of cattle in the local economy and the owner’s adher-ence to a set of notions about the social importance of cattle-herd-ing and the political prominence of cattle-owning men.8

What else can the analysis of settlements tell us about how peo-ple organized their society? As I just suggested, people create settle-


ments in Africa, as elsewhere, according to culturally determinedformulas, embodying in places ideas of social sanction and politicalvalidity. Places achieve special status as the locus of decision-mak-ing, ritual propriety, or domestic activity. In our culture we under-stand the social differences invested in mansions, tract-houses, ormobile homes. We spend our lives distinguishing the cultural val-ues inherent in churches, courts, or pool halls. We regulate ourbehavior and expectations as we move between art galleries, movietheaters, and ball parks. Traces of these cultural prescriptionsremain in the layout and structures found in old settlements.

Having determined which villages were occupied at the sametime, I identified groups of associated settlements, determining therelative size of villages in each grouping in order to locate politicalcenters or places engaged in iron or salt production. In the VictoriaFalls region, in all time periods, settlements were of near-equalsize, suggesting that there was little social differentiation. Animportant commodity like iron was produced at only one village atany one time. Because the economies of African villagers are usu-ally dependent upon social obligation rather than capital wealth,and because iron objects were found in all the villages examined, itwould appear, from our experience of modern Africa, that socialmechanisms disseminated metal among villagers of near-equalsocial standing. Copper was highly valued and traded long dis-tances for the manufacture of objects of bodily adornment; but ittoo was evenly distributed throughout the different villages, sug-gesting that everyone had equal access to status items. Later weshall see that differences in the size of villages and location ofhouses and unequal distributions of status items reflect the socialstanding of a town or its inhabitants.

FIRST FARMERS

IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

The research produced the first sequence of its kind in Africa,answering many questions about the history of culture in theZambezi valley. But what of the larger problem of the monumentalsites? How did this research illuminate the problem of studyingGreat Zimbabwe? Archaeology is an exercise in problem solving.In a perfect world the investigatory challenges archaeology setswould be solved with some strategic excavations in a narrowly


specified study area. Unfortunately, investigation of the complex-ity of emergent society in southeast Africa requires collation ofmany kinds of information from many different parts of the conti-nent. As a result, we need to go back to the start of self-sustainingfood production in subsaharan Africa in order to understand howthe social-ecological arrangements of small-scale savanna farmersunderlie the precolonial states of southeast Africa.9

Who were the first farmers in subsaharan Africa, and how didthey come to rely on agriculture? For a long time it was supposedthat subsaharan African agriculture had diffused from southwestAsia. We now know that more than four thousand years ago peo-ple living along a broad swath of subsaharan savanna experi-mented with managing local food plants, notably the cereals fingermillet, bulrush millet, fonio, and various kinds of sorghum. Peoplelong engaged in the hunting of game apparently found an advan-tage in transhumant pastoralism, managing domesticated herdsrather than being wholly dependent upon the bounty of nature.Consequently, people came to grow plants they had already gath-ered, whose character they already knew, first as fodder for theirstock and later as food plants they ate themselves.10

In time, feasible agricultural systems were established and even-tually food production based on the cultivation of native cereals likethe millets and sorghum was carried south. Cultivated cereals weredrought-resistant enough to do well in the chancy climates of thesouthern savanna, but the nutrient-poor soils could be tilled only byclearing and burning vegetation for their nutrient-filled ash. Thesefields were profitably cropped for three to five years before theywere rested while others were cropped. Thus, shifting subsistencefarmers required access to many garden plots and a total acreagethree to four times that needed to sustain the village. Shifting slash-and-burn cultivation produced adequate yields, but it forced thinpopulation densities and little latitude to increase production.

SLASH-AND-BURN FARMERS ADAPT

TO THE SOUTHERN SAVANNA

Research over the past thirty years suggests that slash-and-burncultivators first came to the southern savanna 1,600 years ago assmall-scale farmers searching out arable land and adequate pas-


turage for their cattle. Their settlements of a few sun-dried clay-walled houses, set in forest openings created by their gardens,transformed the landscape into a mosaic of gardens on freshly cutfields amidst spent clearings regenerating under secondarygrowth.

This is very much the pattern you find today traveling in therural areas of Africa. We can observe that present-day farmers donot uniformly carpet the savanna with their compact villages, nordid their forefathers. I suggest that in the search for arable soil,grass cover, a water source, iron, and other related needs, they dis-persed into small hamlets on small tracts of land.

The seventh- and eighth-century settlements at Kumadzuloand Kabondo Kumbo in the Victoria Falls region are typical earlyfarming hamlets. Each is a group of small houses arranged in con-centric circles around a central open area. At Kabondo Kumbo, thecentral area is filled with pits once used to smelt iron, the remnantsof clay tubes used to pump fresh air into the heart of the furnace,and slag. The square post-hole wall houses were nearly threemeters to a side, with floors prepared from sun-dried clay. Wallposts sunk into the ground were woven together with withies andgrass, covered with puddled clay and topped with a thatched roof.Gardens, fallowing fields, and a grassy clearing for their cattlewere outside the settlement.

In addition to the usual material culture of iron hoes, axes,spearheads, and arrowheads, these hamlets had copper, glass, andcowrie shells, probably obtained through long-distance trade.Because there was no local copper, it probably came from the sameplace as ostrich eggshell beads. The closest source of ostricheggshell was south of the Zambezi, in Zimbabwe or Botswana. Inaddition, an analysis of the early pottery in the region suggests eth-nic ties to people living further south, who used similar designs todecorate their pots. I surmised, based on affinities in potterydesign, that the early cultivators had cultural ties to people livingsouth of the Zambezi. The glass and cowrie shells probably camefrom indirect trade with Indian Ocean traders, and I surmised fromethnographic accounts that this trade was organized along socialnetworks critical to the life of savanna farmers.

We can observe many social networks among the settled peo-ple of Africa. And we can surmise their importance to the mainte-nance of settled life in the past. How are social networks orga-nized? African society may be seen as a mechanism conjoiningpeople into networks of mutual obligation, minimizing the inher-


ent risks of savanna farming. As a result, distant communities arewoven into social networks designed to mediate risk by transfer-ring produce from one place to another. The most critical socialrelationships derived from ties of kinship. In southern Africadescent is most frequently described by the female line (matrilinealdescent). But whether governed by matrilineal or patrilinealdescent, the group holds title to produce from land inherited fromancestors; the owners of the land, who cleared it, lie buried in itand retain an interest in the fortunes of their descendants.Authority is always held by males important in their descentgroup, who act as chiefs or stewards overseeing the well-being oftheir adherents.

As chiefs distribute land to their kin, they retain title to naturalresources—minerals or game—but they delegate authority, whileretaining the right to veto their kin’s decisions, creating a differen-tiated ranking from paramount chiefs down to local headmen andcommon village folk. Living on tribal lands, I, too, sought consentfor my field investigations from my local chief. Often my wife andI sat in a chiefly court discussing my fieldwork, exchanging smallgifts and favors while supplicating villagers on hands and kneespetitioned a claim to land or the settlement of a domestic dispute,which our chief granted or not, as he deemed proper.

There are two other significant social networks as well: oneformed from contracting strategic marriages and the other byalliances of cattle-owning men. Gifts of cattle from the groom’sfamily to the bride’s family create strong bonds between extendedfamilies, and the interaction of cattle-owners creates political bondsbetween men. The different social contracts grant access to produc-tion and labor as a means of minimizing the risks inherent tosavanna farming. In a broad sense, they create an infrastructure offamilies and individuals united by mutual self-interest and a com-mand of resources such as ivory, copper, and gold.

THE FIRST TOWNS APPEAR

IN THE LIMPOPO VALLEY

What were the conditions that caused the emergence of towns andsocial complexity among established cattle-keeping farmers of thesavanna? Were the various social alliances designed to ease


exchanges, minimize environmental risk, and distribute strategicgoods suited to new entrepreneurial roles in long-distance trade? Ihave argued that the roots of the southeast African kingdoms layin the customary politics of savanna farmers, gathering complexityand energy from value created in commerce with Indian Oceantraders. From the earliest times, Asian and Arab traders plied thecoasts of East Africa. In the ninth century, as the Arabs foundedtowns such as Chibuene on the Mozambique coast, they offerednew markets for raw materials.11 By the ninth century their caravanroutes penetrated deep into southeast Africa, bringing exotic luxu-ries from the Orient to exchange for ivory, gold, copper, andslaves.12 As a result, customary leaders on the plateau enhancedtheir personal and corporate status with towns of their own. Howcan we determine this archaeologically? We can locate trade items,of course, but as we saw in the Zambezi valley these things can bereceived indirectly as part of small-scale exchanges. The moreimportant changes in societies of the plateau reflecting the influ-ence of intensive long-distance trade are found not only in the vol-ume of foreign goods but also in alterations to the layout andarrangement of settlements.

Archaeologists analyze settlement variety as one way of dis-cerning the social prominence of the inhabitants. Hierarchies aredetermined by ranking settlements by size. In a typical hierarchicalarrangement, a single large site will be surrounded by a number ofsmaller sites. The settlement pattern suggests that the large townrepresents a center managing the affairs of adherents in its vicinity.As societies become more complex, new levels of managementmay be introduced, represented by sites of intermediate size atsome distance from the center, surrounded by smaller hamlets.This settlement arrangement permits economical management of adistrict and convenient means for distributing its produce.

Before the establishment of the trading networks on theplateau, settlements of nearly equal size dotted the countryside,much as we saw in the Victoria Falls region. Now there appeared aranking of towns and hamlets of varying sizes. Before the rise ofGreat Zimbabwe, Bambandyanalo and Mapungubwe were thelargest towns on the plateau and the homes of the socially elite.Elsewhere, smaller villages located on hilltops probably houseddistrict administrators managing the affairs of the hamlets built onlevel ground. As the Shona confederacy grew more prosperous, itsgrowing social complexity was reflected in the elaboration of itssettlements, as we shall see.


Figure 2Map of southeast Africa, locating the extent of the Zimbabwean trad-ing empire (shaded) and adjacent areas


Although archaeology can describe the growth of complexityfrom the variety of settlements, a critical problem remains: Howdid the early entrepreneurs underwrite both long-distance tradeand their aspirations of elite status? Obviously, control of tradeand raw materials was important. But how could they attract traderoutes and how could they command the exploitation of the miner-als and other commodities sought by foreign traders? We haveseen that economies can command labor as part of wide-ranging

social networks and that entrepreneurs can accumulate wealth incattle or metal. Therefore, archaeologists seek signs of the preva-lence of one or the other. In the Victoria Falls region, the earliesthamlets were organized around iron production, but these earlysettlers were later replaced by ones who organized their livesaround the accumulation of cattle. Elsewhere, early evidence of theprecedence of cattle-herders is attested to at Toutswe and alliedsites in northeastern Botswana. There, a hierarchical pattern of set-tlements laid out around central cattle enclosures suggests theaccumulation of wealth and status in cattle and the political impor-tance of cattle-owning men.13 Because the same kind of settlementpattern is found at Bambandyanalo, archaeologists have surmisedthat the chiefly elite used their status as cattle-owners and theircustomary command of resources to achieve an enhanced politicalcontrol of their community.

By the tenth century, as indicated by the volume of importedgoods and the growth of the town, customary authorities based atBambandyanalo coalesced their control of production, resources,and foreign commerce into a framework of prestige-affirmingactivities regulating material transactions throughout the Limpopodrainage. The prevalence of ivory objects suggests thatBambandyanalo’s entrepreneurs had an active interest in the har-vesting and trafficking of elephant ivory. At the same time,because there is alluvial gold in the vicinity they may have com-missioned the panning of gold, but there is little to confirm this.

Ivory may have been important in the beginning and attractiveto Arab merchants, but as markets for copper and gold grew thelocal producers adjusted accordingly. They left few ore sourcesunexploited. When the first European miners came into southeastAfrica in the nineteenth century they found themselves precededin every instance by long-standing African mining operations. Thegold mines, probably the property of chiefs, were worked byyoung women small enough to crawl into narrow mine shafts. Theoccasional finds of skeletons of young women, as well as theethnographic observation of later mining operations, attest to this.In the 1920s some sought to prove that the miners were peoplefrom India imported by ancient Near Eastern mine owners.Forensic studies of skeletons found in the shafts settled the ques-tion in favor of Bantu-speaking owners and miners.

Archaeology can detect the growth of important places. Buthow do we infer change in the political life of the plateau at thistime? As we have seen, early settlements were arranged around a


central cattle enclosure. The cattle pen is more than the place tokeep cattle safe at night. It is also the heart of village life, the placewhere men gather to tend their animals and debate affairs criticalto the operation of the village. Just as courts or legislative chambersin our culture give a sanction to the decisions made within them,cattle pens among the cattle-owning people of southern Africa givea similar sanction. In the eleventh century, however, a differentkind of decision-sanctioning body developed at Mapungubwe.This was marked by an open area, showing no signs of building.Even at Great Zimbabwe, where space was at a premium andhouses were built so close together that the roofs touched, theplace where men gathered to hear legal cases is clearly discernibleas an open area near the king’s residence. This exclusive men’sassembly area superseded the central cattle enclosure as the site ofgovernance. The new kind of governing assembly also suggests theemergence of a new, more exclusive class of decision-makers. Thesurging economy and the emergence of gold as a trading commod-ity caused control of the trading enterprise to slip away from thelow-lying Bambandyanalo to the nearby hilltop location atMapungubwe. The beginnings of gold working and the reducedimportance of ivory are suggested by the gold and copper orna-ments found with Mapungubwe burials.

Short of conflict, of which there is no evidence, why did thecontrol of the trading enterprise shift from one location to another?The circumstance of changing status may perhaps be explainedwith reference to my own experiences. Occasionally, while travel-ling in the bush, you come across satisfied people administered bya capable leader. The benefits achieved may be psychological—theprospect of good rains or crops gained through the chief’s media-tion—or material—the prospect of participation in valuable distrib-utions of bridewealth or access to good farmland. Nearby are oth-ers less satisfied with the benefits from their alliance. The clients ofthe lesser chief feel compelled by family ties or proximity to main-tain their loyalty, but given the opportunity they would shift to amore powerful combine, or attempt to gain access to more benefi-cial allies. Apparently the Mapungubwe leadership, by organizingthe gold trade, could attract more wealth to itself, underwrite moresubstantial distributions, and command the allegiance of a largerforce.

The customary leaders at Mapungubwe not only commandedthe wealth created through long-distance trade but also began toadopt the trappings of class privilege. Free-stone-walling (stone


courses laid without mortar) demarcated parts of the hilltop for thefirst time, with elite houses erected farther up the hill, away fromthe town, displaying precedence of social rank by their choice of anelevated house site. In the twelfth century the intraregional tradingsystem instituted midlevel managers in smaller hilltop zimbabwes.The common folk lived in farming hamlets arranged around a cen-tral cattle pen. During the thirteenth century, command of theShona confederacy shifted away from the Limpopo valley to GreatZimbabwe.

THE ASCENDANCY

OF THE GREAT ZIMBABWE

Once Great Zimbabwe was a district headquarters within the orbitof Mapungubwe, but when the Save River trade routes generated amore economically managed flow of imports Great Zimbabwedominated exchanges over a broader area than that overseen fromthe Limpopo valley. With the ascendance of Great Zimbabwe, thepopulation and importance of the Limpopo valley declined.

The reasons for Mapungubwe’s decline may be surmised. Weknow from ethnological observations noted above that politicalalliances are often created among those seeking the benefits of alle-giance to elite individuals. The flow of benefits returned assuressupport to the leader’s assertion of privilege. At the same time,clients are drawn to those leaders assuring the best returns. Therulers of Great Zimbabwe derived savings from its compact inte-rior lines of communication, enabling them to forge alliancesthroughout a broad territory ranging from the Limpopo drainageto the Zambezi valley. As a result, their distributions probablyincreased at lower cost, enabling them to expand their investmentin distributions to clients and dampening the ability of others tochallenge their command of goods or services.

Great Zimbabwe was the most prestigious center in southeastAfrica for the next two hundred years; with a population of morethan eighteen thousand it was the equal of many contemporarytowns throughout the medieval world. It organized mining, andthe export of minerals on the plateau and overland trade routesbrought it copper from southern Zaire. All was traded towardArab towns on the Sofala coast. Its elite underwrote new construc-


tion, and new art styles and architecture came to the fore.Community resources were also invested in monumental publicworks allied to the expanded role of its governors.

Monumental construction gave the elite a way to display theirorganizational ability, investing in symbols of the established orderand their custody of it. Social distinction, evident in the emergentarchitectural styles at the Limpopo valley towns, was firmly con-solidated at Great Zimbabwe. Stone was used to join the naturalboulders of the steep central hill and free-standing walls encircledand divided its houses. At the same time, a territorial rainmakingshrine was erected near the Paramount’s dwelling at GreatZimbabwe, probably to affirm his interest in the affairs of the com-mon folk. This affirmation derives from the fact that the role ofrainmaker is a way that village headmen display their value aspurveyors of benefit. In drought-prone southeast Africa, rainfall ishaphazard. Storms unleash torrents of water capable of washingaway young plants, or the sun bakes them into straw.Coordinating planting with the first rains of the season determinessuccess. Therefore, great importance is given to the ritual attendingrainmaking and the mediating role of chiefs in producing it withintheir district. Probably as an extension of this role, the territorialrainmaking shrine at Great Zimbabwe drew attention to its stew-ardship over the whole region.

On the local level the validity of descent claims to authority arereenforced by adherence to ancestor cults honoring the owners ofthe land. As the sphere of authority claimed by the rulersexpanded, the appearance of new kinds of ritual items suggeststhat at this time the parochial role of local ancestor cults was sup-plemented by the institution of an ecumenical rite revolvingaround a senior god, Mwari, administered by the leadership atGreat Zimbabwe.

Why did the customary leaders at Great Zimbabwe feel theneed to involve themselves in managing the ritual affairs of theircommunity? I have suggested that this activity was an expansionof an activity already expected of chiefs. Our understanding of thepolitics of precolonial African societies suggests that customaryleaders had few opportunities to use force to coerce their subjects,therefore they sought other means to sanction their authority.Mystification and control of ritual is a subtle yet effective agency ofpolitical control. In their control of rainmaking for theZimbabwean state and the institution of the rites of the supremeShona god, Mwari, at Great Zimbabwe, Great Zimbabwe’s leader-


ship re-emphasized their interest in benevolent mediation and thecommon good on behalf of their clients.

The network administered by Great Zimbabwe was moreextensive than that attached to Mapungubwe, yet its internal orga-nization was very much the same. Great Zimbabwe was the largestcenter. Smaller zimbabwes with freestone-walling and a men’sassembly area were sited atop hills, while the more frequent farm-ing hamlets, without stone-walling, were laid out as cattle-herdingvillages. The persistence of these settlement variants and the prob-able managerial structure suggests a cultural continuity as well.This accords well with accounts retained in local historical tradi-tion that describe a succession of Karanga clans dominating theeconomic and political life on the plateau.

SOME ARCHAEOLOGICAL

REFLECTIONS

Randall-MacIver, at the British Association meeting at Bulawayo,Rhodesia, in 1905, argued that the reality of the southeast Africantowns was as fabulous as the fiction they once inspired. He told hisaudience that archaeology would not subtract from this wonderbut would instead replace one mystery with another equally fan-tastic romance. Recently, archaeology transformed our under-standing of the African past, fulfilling Randall-MacIver’s predic-tion that science would discover the true romance of Africa.

The role of the archaeologist as anthropologist and historiantreading the mine fields of cultural politics is a difficult one. Moreis involved than field explorations and excavation because ourefforts describe a history of which we have no other record. Theidea that King Solomon’s mines were located in southeast Africa,though challenged by science, stayed an active part of the politicsof southern Africa throughout the colonial period. To this day theorigins of the Great Zimbabwe are challenged by many who pre-fer to describe the monumental southeast African towns as evi-dence of exotic interlopers—Persians, Indians, ancient Israelites,or even fictional European-derived black folk, the Hamites—rather than attribute the monumental towns to African achieve-ment.

Cultural politics aside, there is much satisfaction in the perfor-


mance of a successful reconnaissance or the completion of a large-scale excavation. In southeast Africa field excursions can be long,arduous, and time-consuming propositions. They often requiretravel on foot trails through rural areas, reconnaissance of riverbanks from dugout canoes, interviews with local people, and anintense scrutiny of the ground for faint traces of small settlementsabandoned many years ago. Excavations take you far from the sup-port of towns or colleagues. In the field you must be prepared toimprovise and adapt field methods to the problem at hand whilemaintaining proper control over the investigation and all of itsrecords. Though a well-conducted excavation develops a rhythmof its own, its success depends on the archaeologist’s ability totrain and organize novice field crews while arranging living quar-ters and other necessities deep in the bush.

Is it possible to comprehend an extinct culture solely from theremains of an excavated settlement? My field experience suggeststhat an archaeologist is required to be an anthropologist as well.Sampling a variety of sites by intensive field survey and selectiveexcavation, I could reconstruct a great deal of the daily life in theold villages. In order to understand how they lived in the past, Ifirst had to gain an idea of how people live today. Therefore, Ispent time living among subsistence farmers, discussing themechanics of crop production or cattle management. I soughtinsight into how small-scale subsistence farmers managed theirsocial and economic life and speculated on how such peopleunderwrote the complex stratified societies that so mystifiedarchaeology in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

These conversations were particularly useful during my sur-veys. The linchpin of good field archaeology is the areal field sur-vey, discovering the loci of old occupations. Large-scale surveyscan be very time-consuming and frustrating, except that the bush islittered with clues—patches of discolored soil, disturbed vegeta-tion, particular grass cover, and the like—that indicate to an obser-vant archaeologist the research value of one location over another.When I learned how to read the bush and to think like an Africanfarmer, I could sit atop my vehicle, scanning the wooded edges of abroad grassy opening, and suggest the direction of a walking sur-vey with some assurance that my effort would bear fruit. Small set-tlements of sun-dried clay houses leave little trace of their passing,though the signs are there. Sometimes I would see the stained soilwashing on the trail from an abandoned village. The eighth-cen-tury Zambezi farm site was found this way, during a drive across a


high terrace above the Zambezi river. I found the Kumadzulo siteby noticing that the tree cover was less dense on one edge of aclearing than on the other. A trial cutting, just over a meter deep,uncovered a well-preserved sixth-century village buried under theKalahari sand.

Popular interest has always centered on the supposed mys-tery of Great Zimbabwe, but many other threads run through thehistory of society on the southern savanna and tantalize us, draw-ing us to the wide-ranging problems posed by the past. Whenarchaeology asks the right questions, mystery is swept away. Thecurrent practice of archaeology transcends the description ofmaterial objects in order to define the byways of an extinct cul-ture, finding in the basic qualities of contemporary or recentAfrican society enough to explain long past events, achieving alevel of explanation not available to nineteenth-century archaeol-ogy. As a result, we exorcise the phantoms of the lost civilizationswith a clear understanding of the African roots of these remark-able places.

The first archaeologists in southern Africa construed a world inwhich the zimbabwes were the relics of Near Eastern antiquity. Asa result, they failed to recognize the African origins of these build-ings. They wove fictions of mythical cities, peopled by the longdead of antiquity, lost gold fields, and romantic interludes betweenSolomon and the Queen of Sheba in the middle of Africa. Othercommentators sought evidence of a superior race of African, likethe Galla of Ethiopia, as the builders of zimbabwes. Some sought inthe chevron patterns on some stone-walling a connection with theBerbers of north Africa. But a generation of more scientific archae-ologists sifted the myriad leavings of the past, exploring thebyways of subsistence farmers to construe a very different world,in which traditional African culture was capable of epic achieve-ment.

Modern archaeologists at one time or another have suggestedthat the origins of the monumental towns lay in the prestige-yield-ing activities associated with cattle-ownership, control of trade, orthe propagation of a unifying religion. It is apparent that all threecauses plus the influence of massive inflows of foreign goodseffected the social changes we have examined here. Science neverunearthed the mysterious “lost cities” envisioned by nineteenth-century antiquarians, and it failed to resolve questions that teasedearlier archaeologists. It did better; it restored to the people ofZimbabwe their history.


Chronology of Events Pertaining to Great Zimbabwe

1891 First archaeological investigations at GreatZimbabwe.

September, 1871 First eye-witness description of the Great Zimbabwe published in Europe, fueling speculation that the monumental sites of southeast Africa were the ruins of King Solomon’s Ophir.

1700–present Great Zimbabwe area reoccupied by various Shona-speaking people.

1498–1506 Portuguese take over East Coast trade from the Arabs. Portuguese chronicles recount tales of an abandoned city in the African interior and European maps mark the Empire of Monomatapa in southern Africa.

1450 Great Zimbabwe area declines in importance as competing centers arise in southwest Zimbabwe at Khami and at Fura Mt., the capital of Mwene Mutapa in northern Zimbabwe.

1270–1450 Great Zimbabwe prospers by its control of long-distance and foreign trade. New art and architectural styles develop as Great Zimbabwe becomes a major urban center.

c. 1270 The Mapungubwe area depopulated as Great Zimbabwe becomes the new capital of the Shona trading confederacy.

1100–1270 Great Zimbabwe under the influence of Mapungubwe; the first walled enclosures built.

by 1200 Mapungubwe becomes the capital of the trading confederacy, superseding the leadership of Bambandyanalo.

by 1100 Bambandyanalo, in the Limpopo Valley, establishes links between producers on theplateau and trading towns on the East Coast.

by 1000 Arab towns spread down the Indian Ocean coast to the delta of the Limpopo River. Ivory and gold trade develops


between the interior of southeast Africa and the East Coast.

1000–1100 Shona-speakers settle the central portions of the Great Zimbabwe site.

c. 950 The ancestors of the modern Shona move north of the Limpopo.

900–1000 Hierarchically arranged chiefdoms appear among the cattle-owning pastoralists on the margin of Kalahari in eastern Botswana.

500–900 settlements of subsistence farmers established throughout southern Africa, and farmers settle the Great Zimbabwe region for the first time.

c. 400 Bantu-speaking farmers cross the Zambeziinto southern Africa.

NOTES

1. Classic examples of this fiction are by the English author H. RiderHaggard, whose King Solomon’s Mines, modeled after an earliernovel, H. M. Walmsley’s The Lost Cities of Zululand, describes thesearch for the source of Solomon’s wealth among the ruins of alost ancient city. Haggard’s novel Elissa: The Doom of Zimbabwedescribes life in ancient times at Great Zimbabwe.

2. The best history of opinion on Great Zimbabwe is Peter Garlake’sGreat Zimbabwe. Comprehensive coverage of the history ofresearch and literature on Great Zimbabwe and southeast Africanarchaeology in general is available in Joseph O. Vogel, GreatZimbabwe: The Iron Age in South Central Africa (New York andLondon: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1994).

3. James Theodore Bent, The Ruined Cities of Mashonaland: Being aRecord of Explorations and Excavations in 1891 (London: Longmans,Green and Company, 1892); Robert Hartmann, Die Nigritier: EineAnthropologisch-Ethnologische Monograph. Erste Theil (Berlin: Verlagvon Wiegandt, Hempel und Farey, 1876), pp. 36–41.

4. David Randall-MacIver, Mediaeval Rhodesia (London: MacMillanand Co., 1906).

5. Gertrude Caton-Thompson, Zimbabwe Culture: Ruins and Reactions(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931).

6. Keith R. Robinson, Roger F. H. Summers, and Anthony Whitty,


Zimbabwe Excavations, 1958 (Bulawayo: Occasional Papers of theNational Museums of Rhodesia, 1958), pp. 157–332.

7. Joseph O. Vogel, “The Mosioatunya Sequence,” Zambia MuseumsJournal 1 (1973): 103–152.

8. Adam Kuper, “Symbolic Dimensions of the Southern BantuHomestead,” Africa 50 (1980): 8–23; Thomas N. Huffman, “Snakesand Birds: Expressive Space at Great Zimbabwe,” African Studies40 (1981): 131–150.

9. The suggestion that the social-ecological arrangements of small-scale savanna farmers underlie the precolonial states of southeastAfrica can be found in Joseph O. Vogel, “The Cultural Basis,Development, and Influence of a Socially Mediated TradingCorporation in Southern Zambezia,” Journal of AnthropologicalArchaeology 9 (1990): 105–147; a similar concept of socially medi-ated exchange systems is found in Ricardo T. Duarte, NorthernMozambique in the Swahili World (Uppsala: Central Board ofNational Antiquities, Sweden Studies in African Archaeology 4,1993).

10. Susan K. McIntosh and Roderick McIntosh, “Current Directions inWest African Archaeology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 12(1983): 215–258.

11. Paul L. L. Sinclair, “Chibuene: An Early Trading Site inMozambique,” Paideuma 28 (1982): 150–164

12. The basic information underlying the following discussion of thedevelopment of customary states in southeast Africa may befound in these excellent surveys of the precolonial history ofsouthern Africa: Martin L. Hall, Farmers, Kings, and Traders: ThePeople of Southern Africa 200–1860 (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1987); Thomas N. Huffman, “The Rise and Fall ofZimbabwe,” Journal of African History 13 (1973): 353–366; and PaulL. L. Sinclair, Space, Time, and State Formation (Uppsala: SocietasArchaeologicas Upsaliensis, 1987).

13. James R. Denbow, “A New Look at the Later Prehistory of theKalahari,” Journal of African History 27 (1986): 3–28.

SUGGESTED READINGS

Connah, Graham. African Civilizations. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1987. An excellent survey of a wide range ofAfrican states.

Garlake, Peter S. Great Zimbabwe. London: Thames and Hudson, 1973.


The most complete survey of the history of research on the monu-mental sites of southeast Africa.

Hibbert, Christopher. Africa Explored: European Travellers in the DarkContinent. New York: Viking Penguin, 1982. A useful source ofinformation on early European travels in Africa.

Phillipson, David W. African Archaeology, 2nd ed. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1994. A useful and extensive surveyof all aspects of African prehistory.

Summers, Roger F. H. Zimbabwe: A Rhodesian Mystery. Johannesburg:Nelson, 1963. An excellent introduction to the Great Zimbabweand its interpretation.

Trigger, Bruce G. A History of Archaeological Thought. New York:Cambridge University Press, 1989. A general history of archaeol-ogy containing a discussion of the politics of archaeologicalresearch in southern Africa.


Research TOC

Documents

DE-M P HE G Z ING S M O T O Awps.prenhall.com/wps/media/objects/12330/12626747/myanthropol… · lost biblical city of Ophir—the site of King Solomon’s mines. The history of archaeology