Archaeology

Profile – Great Zimbabwe is the largest stone structure built in precolonial sub-Saharan Africa, raised between roughly the eleventh and fifteenth centuries by ancestors of the Shona people as the capital of a kingdom that controlled trade routes reaching as far as the East African coast. Archaeologists have recovered Chinese porcelain, Persian glass beads, and Arab coins on the site — evidence of a medieval African economy plugged directly into global trade in gold, ivory, and copper.