Further Exploration of Zimbabwe

Abstract

NOTWITHSTANDING the general acceptance of the results of Miss Caton-Thompson's excavations in Rhodesia in 1929, a section of archaeological opinion in South Africa still adheres to the view that the Zimbabwe are more ancient than was then shown, and the work of a people other than of Bantu stock. It will be remembered that when Miss Caton-Thompson submitted her results to the British Association, on behalf of which her excavations had been carried out, at the South African meeting in that year, Prof. Raymond Dart contested her conclusions, arguing for both the greater antiquity of the ruins and their lack of similarity to anything known in indigenous Bantu culture. An alternative suggestion is that they are of pre-Bantu origin, possibly the work of an Hamitic people under Arabian direction. Further research by South African archaeologists, carried out after 1929, tends to confirm, rather than weaken, the view that structures of stone were not alien to early Bantu culture. Such, at least, is the origin attributed to ancient structures, which might, it is thought, have developed into the Zimbabwe, culminating in the unmortared granite towers and walls, thirty feet high and fifteen feet thick, of Great Zimbabwe. It is now reported from South Africa (Observer, September 6) that Prof. Dart, who has just returned to Johannesburg from Southern Rhodesia, proposes a further and more intensive exploration of Great Zimbabwe on a scale which will take five years for completion.