zimbabwe: outraged romantics

…Dr. Randall-MacIver’s professional verdict in 1905 that the Great Ruins of Zimbabwe were “slovenly” in terms of sophistication of architecture, and an effort typical of primitive people; in short Zimbabwe was built by indigenous Africans in the Middle Ages shattered the earlier romantic and sensationalized writings attributing the structure to King Solomon himself or the Queen of Sheba. Who built Zimbabwe was always a loaded question in that the response revealed one’s political bias. It still does…

Maciver’s Medieval Rhodesia quieted the controversy for a time, but did not end it. In 1930 the matter was still considered so perplexing that the british association sent another eminent archaeologist, Dr. Gertrude Caton-Thompson, to review the evidence. On returning, she too wrote a book, Zimbabwe Culture, differing somewhat from MacIver’s opinion about the age of the walls- parts of which, she said, might be two or three centuries older than he thought- but agreeing with him that they were of domestic design and manufacture.

For her pains, Dr. Caton-Thompson was bombarded by letters from outraged romantics who denounced her and her findings in scurrious terms. Systematically she filed this correspondence under the headline “Insane.”

During the 1950’s Rhodesian archaeologists applied carbon-14 tests to organic matter from the ruins, and found that while the site had been occupied, or at least visited, by human beings ever since the Stone Age, the granite structures were all built within the timespan of Rhodesia’s Iron Age.Some of he walls, now crumbled, may date from as early as the fourth century A.D.; the oldest sections of the present walls date from about the thirteenth century; and the rest, including the handsome chevron patterned wall, were built between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. R.N. Hall’s theory, that the best built walls were the earliest was thus shown to be dead wrong, like much of the rest of his sensationalized pseudo-research in The Ancient Ruins of Rhodesia. ( to be continued)

ADDENDUM:

(see link at end)…However, the site was far from exhausted and further excavations were conducted by David Randall-MacIver (1873-1945) in 1905. Randall-MacIver’s conclusions were startling to the colonial administration. During his excavation campaign of 1905, he had found nothing but indigenous African artefacts and imported medieval goods (including Persian beads, glass and Chinese porcelains), all of fourteenth-century and later date. His criticism of Richard Nicklin Hall pulled no punches, sparking off a bitter debate that lasted for years.

Renewed excavations in 1929, conducted by Gertrude Caton-Thompson (1888-1985), confirmed MacIver’s discovery that the material was much later than the time of Solomon, although she was able to push the origin of the site back to the ninth or tenth century CE. In 1950, Samuel Dickson Sandes (1899-1984), Warden of Zimbabwe National Park, recovered a wooden lintel that had been used as a drain cover in the Elliptical Building, which was radiocarbon dated to 1304±55 bp, with a 98% probability of falling into the range 619-819 CE. The Rhodesian archaeologist Roger Summers was able to use this date in 1955 to suggest a slightly earlier origin, but still no earlier than the fifth century CE. Summers’ views on the indigenous origin of Great Zimbabwe and related sites brought him into conflict with the colonial administration, which was beginning to take a hard line on interpretations of the site.

Racist misiniterpretation…

Randall-MacIver’s discoveries did nothing to silence the proponents of external origins. As well as the Semitic origins that had long been popular, origins in southern India (Dravidian traders blown on the monsoon winds) or Malaya (the origin of the population of Madagascar) were also proposed. The Semitic origin theory had been boosted by Henry Rider Haggard’s (1856-1925) adventure novel King Solomon’s Mines, published in 1895, and this r

ned the most popular explanation for the ruins, despite the impossibility of the dating.

In 1930, the German ethnologist Leo Viktor Frobenius (1873-1938) announced in a Cape Town newspaper that he had identified the “source of the civilisation which created Zimbabwe and many hundreds of ruins scattered over Rhodesia, Portuguese East Africa and parts of Bechuanaland”. He placed its foundation between 4000 and 1000 BCE, much earlier than indicated by the archaeologists’ discoveries, and believed the builders to have been Sumerians from near the Caspian Sea. Frobenius also claimed that Atlantis was located in southern Africa…

It is obvious that the interpretation of site in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was coloured by racial prejudice on the part of white European explorers and, later, settlers. Convinced that so complex a monument could not be of indigenous African origin, explorers, antiquaries and archaeologists ignored, misinterpreted and wilfully destroyed evidence. The excavations carried out on the site for more than a century have shown beyond any doubt whatsoever that Great Zimbabwe is an entirely indigenous monument.Read More:http://www.badarchaeology.com/?page_id=1108