The 35-foot-tall stone walls of the Great Enclosure at the site of Great Zimbabwe in southern Zimbabwe measure some 820 feet in diameter. Once thought to have been the site of Shona initiation rituals at the height of Great Zimbabwe’s power from about 1300 to 1450, the enclosure is now believed to have been a royal residence.
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 mo