Great Zimbabwe
Dry-stone walls eleven metres high, built without mortar, by a Shona state.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 350 years
- Known to
- ± 50 years
- Era
- Post-Classical, Holocene
Great Zimbabwe flourishes from around 1100 as the centre of a state controlling gold and cattle and trading through the Swahili coast — Chinese ceramics and Persian glass have been found there. Its enclosures are built of shaped granite blocks laid without mortar, the largest ancient structure south of the Sahara. Colonial-era authorities insisted it must have been built by foreigners; the archaeology has been unambiguous since the 1900s that it is African.