Inside Africa’s Houses of Stone

The hills of southern Zimbabwe are graced with the ruins of some 200 stone-walled settlements built over the last millennium. In Shona, the language spoken today by most of the country’s 17 million people, these are known as zimbabwe, or “houses of stone.” Since the mid-twentieth century, archaeologists have believed that ancestral Shona people who belonged to what is known as the Zimbabwe culture built the soaring drystone, or mortarless, walls beginning around 1200. Many settlements were constructed atop rocky promontories that rise above the country’s flat plains. Scholars think the largest settlements may have been home to up to 15,000 people, and some were still occupied when Portuguese explorers first arrived in the area in the sixteenth century. No written records document most of the roughly 500 years during which the zimbabwes flourished. Oral history and archaeological evidence, however, demonstrate that during this time, the Shona people maintained a robust relationship with Swahili traders of Africa’s eastern coast and exploited rich gold mines that played a critical role in the economy of the world around the Indian Ocean.  

Eric A. Powell is deputy editor at ARCHAEOLOGY.