11 ms·
A Zimbabwean archaeologist reimagines the story of an African civilisation
- Grustaf 5y agoGreat Zimbabwe is very cool and a fascinating structure, but I feel that these gushing descriptions are a bit over the top. Compare Great Zimbabwe to the 2000 year older Gate of Ishtar, or even the 3500 year older Ziggurat of Ur. Even backwaters like Scandinavia had more impressive structures a millennium earlier, in the iron age, like Eketorp.
- selimthegrim 5y agoThanks for the retitling, mods. It's better than my original.
- whatatsentyways 5y agoThis is very impressive. I use NoScript to block unnecessary JavaScript on websites, so I'm used to pages failing to load. But this article's nice scrolling 3D animation works fine on mobile with only the 'economist.com' domain allowed to run JS. Talk about a refreshing change of pace.
- Strs2FillMyDrms 5y ago
- ajdude 5y agoAs someone who also uses noscript, I was just about to post this. Very refreshing.
- thom 5y agoGive me a text version with a separate widget to look at the 3D and this would be usable. I hate faffing with this scrolling one sentence at a time nonsense.
- pell 5y agoReader mode works very well with this one if you want the barebones version.
- lvass 5y agoBummer, I can't even enable reader mode in firefox as the page instantly fails to load. I've disabled WebGL over security concerns.
- invalidusernam3 5y agoIt's only the intro that has the 3D visualisation, the meat of the article is normal text and worth a read
- thom 5y agoDidn't get there, and also had no way to know it _was_ there because of this stupid doodad.
- bombela 5y agoI usually complain about stuff like that. But honestly it is really well executed here. And it's only for the introduction. I think that we are so conditioned to have shitty experiences, that we brace ourselves at the first sign of multimedia.
- thom 5y agoDestroying people's ability to navigate and understand the structure of a text is one of the reasons this kind of thing is terrible for users.
- boffinAudio 5y agoIt is immensely interesting to see the de-westernization of modern archaeology .. it seems to be being forced by the artefacts themselves, which provide ample motivation and evidence that western ideals need not be applied to ancient ways. It is one of those subjects where the intersection of religious fervour and scientific rigour has produced endless falsehoods - yet with every scrape in the dirt we get more and more truth behind human history. As an armchair fan of archeological endeavours from Gobekli Tepe to the forests of the Amazon, I can only hope that the elevation of Great Zimbabwe in the human lexicon results in further enlightenment with regards to our human history. It is very rewarding to see the veils of christian political movements falling from the stage of archeological accomplishment. We need more of this.
- dathinab 5y agoIt's less "de-westernization" and more a internationalization and the removal of racist ideology in archeology. Archeology was for decades deeply affected by racist believes, both directly and indirectly by building on-top of research which was affected without realizing it. Idk. why but people often forget that the race ideology (crossed with nationalism and religion) which is today often seen a "being a nazi thing" was very wide spread even before the German Nazis became a thing all around the western world (and also outside of the western world replacing "european-white supremacy" with e.g."japanese-asian supremacy", but that kinda doesn't matter for this discussion). A good example how the mindset affected "historic" research for a long time, is how for a long time it was believed that in pre-human history in each step of evolution there where always a few "evolved" sub-subspecies from a human predecessor and only one survived "by itself/without mixing". Which as it turns out is complete bs as there was a constant interbreeding of such species and the modern human is a result of this interbreeding (sure some species traits dominated, but either way it wasn't still constant DNA exchange of sub-species, i.e. "pre-humans" which are noticeable more different then any two modern humans of different ethnicity).
- boffinAudio 5y ago>internationalization = de-westernization Or do you consider that the rising economies and cultures of Africa are 'part of the west', now? I think it says a lot that a non-European archeologist had to do the field work on this site to start to convince the world that the prejudiced conclusions made decades ago were incorrect. I concur with you that people discount the racism of our cultures that existed prior to nazism - heck they do it with our extant cultures in the modern era too. There are plenty of examples in the modern era where racism and prejudice preclude an honest look at a nation states pre-history (cough Australia cough) and these, in many cases deep-rooted prejudices are most definitely an affliction of our modern era. Which is why it is great to see a non-Western academic address the issue of Great Zimbabwe in a way that reveals the truth of the matter - naysayers in the entrenched, hallowed European halls be damned ..
- foxhop 5y ago
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoIs this satire? The construction of New England's rock walls is well documented and occurred primarily between 1700ish (starting date varies greatly based on location) and 1840ish (when it became substantially less economically useful to clear land to graze sheep for wool) with a long tail extending up until the industrialization of the 1870s.
- sgt101 5y agoAlso, in about 1840 a great chunk of the New England colonial population headed west and did more colonization in California.
- foxhop 5y ago
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> they don't talk about raising monolithic walls through out the region. A monolithic wall would be a hell of a feat.
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoI'm not watching a 1hr presentation/video. Your quoted math is nonsense. There's ~250k miles of stone wall in New England. Divide by a ~100yr construction period, and you get 2500mi/yr. Average pop was say 1.25mil (I'm underestimating for easy math) over the period so you get 1.25mil person*years per year. The mathematical writing should be on the wall at this point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_England#Population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_England#Po...
- thrower123 5y agoDo you have any conception of how many rocks that you turn up plowing a field in New England? And that's in the places where somebody has been plowing the field for 300 or more years, picking rocks out of it every spring. I don't know where they come from, but there is a never-ending supply... You've got to do something with them.
- 1cvmask 5y agoAfrica is full of so many great civilization stories, that they highlighted this relatively recent one from 1200 to 1550: in its prime, from around 1200 to 1550, Great Zimbabwe was home to about 10,000 people. The state covered 1,779 acres, more than twice the area of New York’s Central Park. ----- From Ancient Egypt to Carthage to the Malian Empire (with wealthy cities like Timbuktu) there are so many remarkable parts in Africa. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbuktu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbuktu
- rory 5y ago> Great Zimbabwe was home to about 10,000 people. The state covered 1,779 acres That seems... absolutely tiny? 7km^2, so a reasonably fit person could run around the entire country in an hour. Population of 10k at a time when the total population of Africa was in the tens of millions. Not a value judgement, but I'm honestly shocked how small those numbers are.
- woodruffw 5y agoIs it tiny! But not relative to other pre-modern cities: Ancient Rome was only about 15km^2, counting the area within the Aurelian Walls[1] (which includes the massive Campus Martius in addition to the famous hills). Rome was significantly more densely populated, but that can also be explained by geographic and economic factors (seafaring economies, &c.). Edit: the area within the inner Servian Walls was ~1/3rd that of Great Zimbabwe (~2.5km^2). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurelian_Walls#/media/File:Map_of_ancient_Rome.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurelian_Walls#/media/File:Map...
- rory 5y agoAh it appears I was confused by the word "state"-- according to Wikipedia, the thinking is it was more of a capital and/or the seat of a ruler and territory controlled could have been a lot bigger, although we don't know for sure.
- ciphol 5y agoAncient Rome had a population of 800k though, compared to 10k in Great Zimbabwe.
- trabant00 5y agoA 250 meter long wall 11 meters tall is far from "triumph of engineering" even in 1200. "Drainage channels" are far from "evidence of a sophisticated civilisation". They could even be naturally formed by water along the unpaved ground and other parts of the world had sewer systems a lot earlier. I could go on and talk about 10k people and so on... Why? Why do they feel the need to do this?
- aa-jv 5y ago>Why do they feel the need to do this? Because of a history of archeology degrading the people of the region, perhaps, and a desire to apply the same civilization-building moral standards to Africa as the rest of the world? A 250 meter long wall, 11 meters tall .. made out of nothing but bricks (no mortar, remember) .. surviving mostly intact after 10 centuries? That is definitely a triumph of engineering, by anyones standards ..
- trabant00 5y agoSo you fight one exageration by exagerating in opposite direction? This only gives ammunition to the opposite side.
- jeromegv 5y agoDid you do anything to fight the first exaggeration? Or you're just showing up now that it is about Africa?
- hiptobecubic 5y agoI feel like this is the main point people are missing. Literally every time there's a "feature" of anything that isn't already accepted by mainstream audiences, people start trotting out all the millions of reasons that isn't special, but ignore that these reasons aren't unique at all. See basically any technical media created by women for thousands more examples of this. Some woman makes a video about coding or something and people focus on how she doesn't use vim efficiently enough, she doesn't have a good enough mic set up, she is only working on "basic crud apps" etc etc.
- pythonlion 5y agobeen there. very enigmatic place, no symbols no text no remnants. just huge walls on the hills and around.
- kikokikokiko 5y ago
- prmph 5y ago
- gutitout 5y ago1. This is written in Arabic 2. Ge’ez script is from Yemen Nothing here about second stories in buildings. Not saying you’re wrong, but I don’t see how this comment refutes anything the one above said.
- prmph 5y ago1. If you had read the wikipedia article carefully , you would see that the Timbuktu manuscripts are written, not only in Arabic, but also in West African languages like Songhay and Tamasheq. 2. The Geez script is not from Yemen, please read the wikipedia article carefully: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ge%CA%BDez#Origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ge%CA%BDez#Origins As for story buildings, have you heard of the Lalibela Churches? [1] Granted they are hewn out of rock, but this is a quote form the linked article: > The churches were not constructed in a traditional way but rather were hewn from the living rock of monolithic blocks. These blocks were further chiselled out, forming doors, windows, columns, various floors, roofs etc. This gigantic work was further completed with an extensive system of drainage ditches, trenches and ceremonial passages, some with openings to hermit caves and catacombs. Unless you don't consider Ethiopia to be a sub-saharan country (which to me is even an absurd distinction) [1] https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/18/ https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/18/
- 5y ago
- easytiger 5y ago> In 1889 Willi Posselt, another German explorer, bribed a local bigwig and stole one of Great Zimbabwe’s bird carvings which had spiritual importance for the local Shona people. Stole, or bought? Increasingly common to erase all acquisition as theft because it happened a long time ago. Can think of other examples too. The famous cock from Cambridge "returned" a few months ago. For example
- woodruffw 5y agoI think "stole" is appropriate given that (1) the "local bigwig" wasn't likely the rightful owner of the bird carving, and (2) colonialism has historically relied on asymmetrically informed "sales" to export wealth back to the West. See also: Manhattan's "sale" for $24 of beads. Contemporary Americans spend years in court arguing that sums far less were stolen from them in far more legitimate "sales."
- rscoots 5y agoWhat are the contemporary moral considerations for who gets to ‘own’ ancient artifacts like these? The government currently controlling the surrounding land? Ethnic tribalism? Genetic essentialism? Protection of the artifact? Exposure/accessibility of the artifact? ‘Feelings’-based reasons like ‘spiritual’ significance or paternalistic rich nations graciously returning things to the poors? Much to ponder
- woodruffw 5y agoThese are all perfectly reasonable points that archaeologists, anthropologists, and preservationists are currently dealing with as part of the broader movement to repatriate artifacts. They're more qualified to answer these questions than I am, but my layman's opinion is that a national museum in the country where the artifact originated seems like a reasonable first-blush recipient. There are, doubtless, exceptions.
- rscoots 5y ago> a national museum in the country where the artifact originated seems like a reasonable first-blush recipient. Wouldn’t this boil down to a might-is-right approach in almost all cases? Don’t really see how a contemporary government annexing the land by force is much different than a foreigner simply taking the artifact. Other than that it might evoke more ethnic/tribalist gripes from people.
- stakkur 5y agoThe breathless language of this 'presentation'--and the silly superlatives like 'a triumph of engineering' tell me this is some kind of agenda presented as 'archaeology'.
- md_ 5y agoGenuinely curious: what's your background with archaeology? I assume you're pretty well-versed to make such a criticism?
- m0llusk 5y agoZimbabwe is interesting, but hard to compare to recent work that shines light on the pre-Saharan civilizations that led through migration during climate change to the earliest dynasties of Egypt. Africa has a really long and complex history with Zimbabwe being a relatively late and modest component elevated largely because of a not entirely rational obsession with stone building remains. In a similar way it is only recently that some of the earliest artifacts are being uncovered in South America because so few stone buildings were left behind.