There is no written word from the interior south of the Zambezi or from the Comoros in 1200; all that is known is from excavation. In 1200 the capital of the middle Limpopo polity was still K2 (Bambandyanalo), occupied from about 1000; the move of the court onto Mapungubwe Hill, with its gold burials and its separation of king from people, is dated to about 1220, and the hill was abandoned about 1290 to 1300. On the Zimbabwe plateau Mapela Hill was already building stone terraces in the eleventh century and the Hill Complex at Great Zimbabwe was occupied by the twelfth century, though its great walls came later; Toutswemogala in eastern Botswana was the centre of a cattle-keeping chiefdom from about 700 to 1300. On the Comoros the Dembeni-phase settlements of the ninth and tenth centuries had given way to small Muslim trading towns tied to the Swahili coast. Glass beads from India and the East, Chinese ceramics and the gold and ivory traffic through Sofala are the thread that ties these sites to the Swahili coast and to the Arabic sources.
About this source
- Title
- Mapungubwe, the Zimbabwe plateau, Toutswe and the Comoros: the archaeological record
- Author
- Various
- Author's dates
- excavators from the 1930s onward
- Written
- no text; radiocarbon-dated sites
- Language
- none
- Covers
- about 900 to 1300
- Kind
- Collection of sources
Dates are radiocarbon ranges, not years; the 1220 date for the move to Mapungubwe Hill is a modelled estimate. Huffman's synthesis and Chirikure's revisions disagree on whether Mapungubwe was the single origin of the Zimbabwe tradition. The Internet Archive copy of Huffman's book is lending-only.
Where to read it
Editions
- T. N. Huffman, Mapungubwe: Ancient African Civilisation on the Limpopo (Johannesburg, 2005) (not freely online)
- S. Chirikure and others, Zimbabwe culture before Mapungubwe: new evidence from Mapela Hill, south-western Zimbabwe, PLOS ONE 9 (2014), open access
- S. Chirikure and others, What was the population of Great Zimbabwe (CE 1000 to 1800)?, PLOS ONE 12 (2017), open access
- J. Denbow, Cows and kings: a spatial and economic analysis of a hierarchical Early Iron Age settlement system in eastern Botswana, in Frontiers: southern African archaeology today (Oxford, 1984), for Toutswe (not freely online)
- H. T. Wright, Early seafarers of the Comoro Islands: the Dembeni phase of the IXth to Xth centuries AD, Azania 19 (1984) (not freely online)
Read it online
- UNESCO World Heritage: Mapungubwe Cultural Landscape
- UNESCO World Heritage: Great Zimbabwe National Monument