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Grand ideas and concepts in archaeological thinking often betray the time and situation in which they were born. When 20th-century archaeologists began to define the place of urban society in global history, their definitions ran conspicuously like a checklist of a 20th-century image of the cities that flourished in ancient Western Asia and the Greco-Roman world. The vision of ancient cities became one of walls, temples, markets, and institutions. Other aspects of society were assigned to the shadows. These could be as significant as, for example, providing shelter in the form of private housing. Or rising to the challenge of provisioning a large, closely packed population with water.
The traditional emphasis on monumental urban traditions is hardly surprising: Western historians were familiar with Classical Antiquity through written traditions, and travellers had marvelled for centuries at the grand, ruined monuments of Mesopotamia or the Middle East. Enterprising antiquarians had mined the same sites for sculpture, artefacts, and texts, which crowded collections and museums around the world. Meanwhile, the history of other parts of the globe was often left rather less visible.
Urban laboratories
A century of global archaeological research has profoundly changed our view of history, as forgotten civilisations have re-entered our memory, and local traditions have become more widely known. This is a process familiar to Shadreck Chirikure at the University of Oxford. As he is professor of archaeological science and director of the Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art, much of his time and energy is devoted to the study of ancient technologies and innovation, or developing new methods of analysis. But he also turns in many scholarly papers exploring the questions of urbanism as reflected in African archaeology.
As Chirikure points out, urban societies existed in many parts of Africa prior to the modern period: among the Zimbabwe culture in southern Africa, on the Swahili coast of East Africa, in Axumite Ethiopia, in the Niger Delta, and Nigeria, to mention just a few regions. These civilisations are fascinating urban laboratories, in which cosmologies, ecologies, and social organisation often connected settlements, societies, and landscapes in different ways to the Greek and Roman strongbox-cities, which packed everything together into a close-knit urban space.
Perhaps the most famous of the ancient African cities is Great Zimbabwe. When 19th-century European colonialists first became aware of the impressive monuments, which today lend their name to the Republic of Zimbabwe, it seemed like a site that had fallen into a time-loop. The newcomers suspected that its impressive dry-stone buildings, towers, and walls – some still standing as high as 11m – had been constructed by ancient foreigners. One possibility they floated was that this was the handiwork of the enigmatic Phoenicians, who Herodotus said had managed to circumnavigate Africa. (The Phoenicians might not have existed as a population group in quite the same way as once thought – something we know today courtesy of, among others, the brilliant work of Josephine Quinn, professor of ancient history at the University of Oxford.)
Research has long since shown that these structures were in fact constructed by the ancestors of the Shona people, and formed the centre of a medieval kingdom that flourished between c.AD 1100 and 1400. It has also revealed that the stone monuments were just one part of a sprawling capital with a population numbering in the thousands. Sustaining such a concentration of people would have been a major feat on the East African plain, especially during the dry season.
Harvesting water
Research has recently furnished a surprising new clue about the secret of Great Zimbabwe’s society. Using airborne laser-scanning in combination with geoarchaeological analyses, a team that included Shadreck Chirikure and Innocent Pikirayi from the University of Pretoria, South Africa, managed to map the landscape around the great monuments. Their results were recently published in the journal Anthropocene.
Thanks to these scans, they could trace the remains of numerous large, circular depressions within and beyond the settlement area. Some of these were still known locally as dhaka pits, but the quantity detected was far greater than previously suspected.
These dhaka pits were clearly constructed to collect and retain rainwater during the wet season. The researchers estimate that this reservoir system could have held as much as 18,000m³ of water. This resource goes a long way to explaining how Great Zimbabwe’s rulers were able to attract so many people to the site, and then sustain them once they got there.
As at many other early urban sites, the population of Great Zimbabwe would have waxed and waned with the seasons, and the water held in the dhaka pits might have been a crucial factor that attracted them. Such was the experience of author Karen Blixen, who famously recounted her experience as a colonial coffee farmer in 1920s Kenya in her renowned book Out of Africa, which was adapted for film with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford in the lead roles. Blixen recalls how she once had a large pond constructed at her farm, which duly attracted throngs of people and animals in the dry months. Yet, as the pond was being dug, Farah Aden – her head servant – told her that she must not try to stop the flow of water: ‘This water belongs in Mombasa…’. Because the water was regarded as a community-managed resource, her pond was in turn recognised and treated as a public good.
If a similar approach to ownership of water was active in Great Zimbabwe, the number of people who regularly met and interacted on the plain surrounding the monuments could have been far greater than the size of the population who stayed here throughout the year, with visitors attracted by the water when it was scarce. It is fascinating to think that this wider community might have been dispersed for much of the year, but still have interacted as much as the occupants of an average Roman city.
Communicating vessels
The dhaka pits of Great Zimbabwe point to one way in which urban societies varied across the ancient world. By following the water, then, we end up going against the flow of traditional thinking about early cities and the attractions that they held. The craftsmen, merchants, ruling elites, and religious leaders at Great Zimbabwe only had the opportunity to thrive because of the circular depressions strategically placed at the base of the Hill Complex – features so inconspicuous that it took a detailed scanning survey to detect them. We have these subtle indentations to thank, then, for the architectural splendours of Great Zimbabwe.
The results are important for understanding the ancient world, and potentially also for our present. Modern cities have inherited a style of resource management modelled on the Greco-Roman strongbox approach. Perhaps we can learn from the climate-smart landscaping adopted centuries ago in Great Zimbabwe to store water and ensure it is available for times and situations when people, animals, and crops risk going thirsty. Solutions are certainly needed, as cities from Cape Town to Barcelona struggle to endure droughts.
The water management of this early African centre reminds us how urban worlds are connected together, running from the top of society down to the foot of the hill and back again. This is a timely lesson from a past urban world, which today entices archaeology to swim against the current of traditional perceptions.
Rubina Raja is professor of classical archaeology and director of the Centre for Urban Network Evolutions, Aarhus University, Denmark. Together with Søren, she is founding editor of the Journal of Urban Archaeology.
Søren M Sindbæk is professor of medieval archaeology at Aarhus University, Denmark, and co-director of the Centre for Urban Network Evolutions.
