Great Zimbabwe: The Iron Age of South Central Africa

First Published in 1994. This research guide was written as a comprehensive, though by no means exhaustive, survey of the literature pertinent to studying the indigenous complex societies of south central Africa. Although the paramount focus of the compilation was the archaeology of Great Zimbabwe, the author has drawn from a broad geographical area and a wider period of time than that usually associated with Zimbabwean culture in order to demonstrate the cultural background for the growth of monumental trading towns in south central Africa.

About the Author

The editor, Joseph O. Vogel, was born in the South Bronx, in New York City, in 1936. He received his undergraduate training in anthropology at Hunter College in New York City. While still an undergraduate, he travelled first to southern Illinois to excavate at the Modoc rock shelter with the Illinois State Museum, and South Dakota, to dig at a number of prehistoric villages, with the Smithsonian Institution River Basin Survey. He pursued graduate studies at the University of California-Berkeley, while working as a preparator in the R.H. Lowie Museum of Anthropology and revisiting the Midwest to excavate a number of prehistoric sites for the Kansas State Historical Society. In 1961, he dug at the great Mississippian site of Cahokia and then spent the next three years revisiting Cahokia and analyzing the large collection of ceramics excavated there. Following his years at Cahokia, he spent a year and a half exploring the French fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. with the National Park Service, Canada. In 1964, he was appointed Keeper of Prehistory at the Livingstone Museum, Livingstone, Zambia. Over the next decade, he, and his wife, explored regions around Lake Bangweulu in northeastern Zambia, traveled to eastern Zambia, and conducted excavations at Late Stone Age caves in the Mumbwa district of central Zambia, as well as extensive stratigraphic excavations in the Upper Zambezi Valley, buLozi, and the Victoria Falls region. The outcome of these later investigations was a comprehensive reconstruction of the settlement history of southwestern Zambia. He conducted an ethnographic survey of traditional African farming, which influenced his ideas on the history of farming in southeastern Africa, the development of small-scale polities, and their evolution into statelike formations. In 1974, he earned his doctorate from Balliol College, University of Oxford, for a dissertation synthesizing his many years of archaeological fieldwork in the Victoria Falls region.