An Open Question, By Order
The archaeology of Great Zimbabwe was settled in 1906 and settled again, unanswerably, in 1929. What followed was not a scholarly dispute but a state policy requiring the country's own museums to describe the builders as unknown.
The outer wall of the Great Enclosure runs some 250 metres around, stands eleven metres high at its tallest and is about five metres thick where it meets the ground. It is built of granite split off the hills behind it — heated with fire, cracked with water — then dressed by hand and laid dry. There is no mortar in it, no timber frame, and no arch anywhere on the site. Estimates of the block count run towards a million. On the radiocarbon evidence it went up between roughly the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries, raised by the ancestors of the people farming the valley below it now.
For most of the twentieth century, saying that last sentence out loud in this country could cost you your job. By then it was not a scholarly dispute — the archaeology had answered the question in 1906 and answered it again, comprehensively, in 1929. It was policy.
What is standing
Three things, and they are not a single design. The Hill Complex sits on a granite whaleback and fits its walling in between boulders rather than clearing them, which is the detail that tells you the builders were working with the rock and not against it. The Great Enclosure lies below, with the conical tower inside it: about ten metres of solid stonework, no door, no chamber, no agreed function. Between and around them the Valley Ruins, where most of the population actually lived and where almost no visitor walks. Excavation has pulled Chinese stoneware, Persian glazed ware, glass beads from India and coral out of the ground here, alongside gold and copper worked on site — this was the inland end of a trade that reached the Indian Ocean at Sofala. Estimates for the peak population start around ten thousand and the upper end is still argued over. So is why it emptied in the fifteenth century, with soil and firewood exhaustion, the gold trade shifting north to Mutapa, and ordinary political succession all in the running.
Ophir, and the company that needed it
Karl Mauch, a German geologist, reached the site in 1871 and decided he was looking at the Queen of Sheba's Ophir. Twenty years later the British South Africa Company sent James Theodore Bent to dig, and Bent published a Phoenician or Sabaean origin — some vanished northern race, long gone. In 1902 Richard Nicklin Hall was appointed curator and set about clearing what he described as the filth of later occupation, removing up to several metres of deposit across the site. He was dismissed in 1904. The stratigraphy he destroyed has never been recovered, and it is the single largest loss in the archaeology of southern Africa.
The correction came quickly and from inside the British establishment. David Randall-MacIver excavated in 1905 and published Mediaeval Rhodesia the following year, concluding the site was African and medieval. In 1929 Gertrude Caton-Thompson excavated it again for the British Association, working the undisturbed deposits Hall had missed, and reported that every detail of construction and every dated object pointed to a Bantu-speaking African origin. Her book appeared in 1931. Professionally, that was the end of it.
Randall-MacIver published the right answer in 1906 and Caton-Thompson published it again in 1931. Everything that happened afterwards was not about the evidence. It was about who was permitted to repeat it.
An open question, by order
After the unilateral declaration of independence in November 1965, the Rhodesian government took an interest in what its own institutions said about the site. Official publications were required to present the origin of Great Zimbabwe as unresolved — a debate between theories rather than a settled finding — and the museums service enforced it on guidebooks, displays and staff. Peter Garlake, who had been Senior Inspector of Monuments since 1964 and had published on the site, resigned in 1970 and left the country. Paul Sinclair, working there in the 1970s and later a professor at Uppsala, has described being told plainly by the museums organisation not to say publicly that the builders had been African. Guides were briefed on what not to volunteer. This was a state censoring an answer that had been in print for sixty years, in order to protect a claim it needed about who had built what in the country it was governing.
The bird was on the other flag too
Eight soapstone birds were taken off the Hill Complex in the 1890s and scattered. The emblem they became is the strange part. Southern Rhodesia put the Zimbabwe Bird on its coat of arms in 1924 and it stayed on coins, stamps and banknotes for the next half-century — the state that would not concede who had carved it used it as a national symbol throughout. On 18 April 1980 the new state took its name from the site, dzimba dza mabwe, and put the bird on its flag, where it remains. Most of the birds are back at the site museum. The lower half of one spent a century in Berlin's ethnological collection and was returned in 2003, where it was refitted to the top half that had never left.
Who holds it now
The National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe runs the site, and its problems are ordinary conservation ones. Dry stone laid on a slope moves, sections of walling come down at intervals, and NMMZ keeps a masonry team whose job is to rebuild them in the technique they fell from — which is harder than it sounds and is itself contested, because a rebuilt wall stops being evidence the moment it is rebuilt. Local clans hold competing claims to traditional custodianship of the hill and ceremonies take place there by arrangement; the site is a monument and a working sacred place at the same time, and UNESCO's 1986 inscription covers both. Meanwhile the argument has moved on, and moved home: Innocent Pikirayi, Shadreck Chirikure and the generation of Zimbabwean archaeologists around them have spent two decades reworking the chronology from Bayesian dating and questioning whether the neat succession from Mapungubwe to Great Zimbabwe to Khami holds up at all. That is what a settled site looks like — nobody arguing about who built it, everybody arguing about when, in what order, and why it stopped. Go up the hill by the old cleft path rather than the graded one, and note that the walls are fitted around the boulders instead of flattening them, which is the whole argument in one detail and takes about four seconds to see.