Beautifully produced and illustrated, this study of the Zimbabwean birds is more than a description or history of the eight soapstone carvings found at the Great Zimbabwe historical site. It offers an insight into an aspect of the cultural heritage of Zimbabwe and an interpretation of the important site of Great Zimbabwe from which it is inherited. The story of the birds is used to explore themes in Zimbabwean historiography. By focusing on the religious symbolism of the birds, the author argues that the Great Zimbabwe site was both a political and religious centre. Practically the work illustrates the central symbolic meaning of the birds to the people and nation of Zimbabwe. And the work is in the context of the construction of an authentic national history. In a foreward, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Zimbabwe says that the birds are constitutents of a living tradition embodying the body spirit of the modern national state of Zimbabwe.

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.

Conditioned by local ways of knowing and doing, Great Zimbabwe develops a new interpretation of the famous World Heritage site of Great Zimbabwe. It combines archaeological knowledge, including recent material from the author’s excavations, with native concepts and philosophies. Working from a large data set has made it possible, for the first time, to develop an archaeology of Great Zimbabwe that is informed by finds and observations from the entire site and wider landscape. In so doing, the book strongly contributes towards decolonising African and world archaeology. Written in an accessible manner, the book is aimed at undergraduate students, graduate students, and practicing archaeologists both in Africa and across the globe. The book will also make contributions to the broader field such as African Studies, African History, and World Archaeology through its emphasis on developing synergies between local ways of knowing and the archaeology.

The book opens a window onto Africa's symbolism, confirming that the mind naturally computes according to two parallel codes: the outer code of sensory awareness, and the inner code of subjective awareness. More than two hundred images of Zimbabwe's historical art, taken during a window of time when it was still possible to find it, reveal how art is expressed across life as the language of spiritual and cultural meaning - a way of ensuring that such meaning was never far from individual awareness. The majority of the images were taken in the more remote "communal lands", regions "set aside" for Africans during the colonial era. It was here that an African sense of identity, culture, and history survived colonialism and the effects of a malign dictatorship. Most of the images date from the period 1998 to 2015, during which time Duncan Wylie, the artist who took the photographs, traveled back to the country of his birth to undertake what he describes as a "work of transmission and a valuable insight for the non-African world toward a deeper appreciation of African art forms, and a wider perception of the possibilities of art, a world few have experienced." Zimbabwe offered a unique opportunity to look back a thousand years into African symbolism via the Great Zimbabwe ruins. This medieval city, built in stone, reveals an architecture and style that is as unique to the culture as it is rich in symbols, from its enigmatic solid stone tower and massive walls, which had no defensive function, to the stone "Zimbabwe Birds" that are a symbol of the contemporary nation. A highly symbolic statement was to photograph the ancient stone birds (dating back to the height of Great Zimbabwe's power in the 1350s) outside a museum context and on the ruins where they once stood. The work represented by the images and text is the result of a partnership between the artist, who took the images over a period of 17 years, and the author, who began a life-long involvement with the arts of Zimbabwe and sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s, as curator of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe. But accolades must go to the communities themselves, the subjects of these images, for without their dedication to the project of recording their culture in the face of its increasing disappearance, this book could never have come into being.

Describes the country of Zimbabwe.

This book examines the politics of landscape and heritage by focusing on the example of Great Zimbabwe National Monument in southern Zimbabwe. The controversy that surrounded the site in the early part of the 20th century, between colonial antiquarians and professional archaeologists, is well reported in the published literature. Based on long term ethnographic field work around Great Zimbabwe, as well as archival research in NMMZ, in the National Archives of Zimbabwe, and several months of research at the World Heritage Centre in Paris, this new book represents an important step beyond that controversy over origins, to focus on the site's position in local contests between, and among individuals within, the Nemanwa, Charumbira and Mugabe clans over land, power and authority. To justify their claims, chiefs, spirit mediums and elders of each clan make appeals to different, but related, constructions of the past. Emphasising the disappearance of the 'Voice' that used to speak there, these narratives also describe the destruction, alienation and desecration of Great Zimbabwe that occurred, and continues, through the international and national, archaeological and heritage processes and practices by which Great Zimbabwe has become a national and world heritage site today.

Since the monumental architecture of the Zimbabwe Plateau first became known to Westerners in the 16th century, speculation about the people that created it has been continuous and inventive. Tales of strongholds in the interior were taken home by the first Portuguese chroniclers of the Swahili coast, and their narratives became part of the geographic lore of the 17th and 18th centuries. In the mid-19th century, the lore was spun into fantastic and mysterious yarns about long-lost riches that lured adventurers and traders. Pikirayi (history, U. of Zimbabwe) aims to set the record straight by examining the growth of precolonial states on the plateau and adjacent regions, with a focus on the their historical and cultural development during the second millennium AD. c. Book News Inc.