Innocent Pikirayi. The Zimbabwe culture: origins and decline of southern Zambezian states.

Lane, Paul

xxx+305 pages, 52 figures, 25 maps, 3 tables. 2001. Walnut Creek (CA): Altamira; 0-7591-0090-X hardback $65, 0-7591-0091-8 paperback $24.95.

Few archaeological sites elsewhere on the African continent have inspired as much scholarly; amateur and popular interest as that of Great Zimbabwe. At least since the German explorer Karl Mauch visited the remains in September 1871 and drew them to the attention of the outside world, Great Zimbabwe has had a role to play in European imaginings of Africa and Africa's past. Well before Mauch claimed to have 'discovered' Great Zimbabwe, however, the site and its environs were important economic, political, religious, and/or, spiritual spaces for the local Shona inhabitants, their neighbours as Far as afield as the Zambezi and Kalahari Desert, and even the residents of various towns on the East African coast such as Sofala and Kilwa. Most previous studies and works of synthesis have tended to focus either more or less exclusively on Great Zimbabwe itself, or on what archaeologists now term 'Zimbabwe Tradition' sites, which span the period c. 1040-1650 AD. In this respect, Innocent Pikirayi's book stands out from the crowd. For, whereas like others, he discusses the archaeology of the Mapungubwe period which preceded the rise in prominence of Great Zimbabwe, and that of the Khami phase which followed Great Zimbabwe's demise, he also discusses in some detail the archaeology of the immediately pre-Mapungubwe phase and that of the later periods of European contact, first with the Portuguese and subsequently with the British. This book, then, is the first long-term synthesis of the archaeology of the southern Zambezian states, of which that centred on Great Zimbabwe remains the best known.

The first two chapters provide an introduction to, respectively, the history of research on Great Zimbabwe and the Zimbabwe Culture, and the natural environments of southern Zambezia. While these do not really break new ground, both provide a solid overview of the intellectual and physical landscapes that are the loci of Pikirayi's interest. Most encouraging, perhaps, is the acknowledgement given to evidence from the region for environmental change over the past 2000 years and, in particular, the cycles of drought that are known, at least from historical sources, to have had an impact on local populations and their economies. Even so, it would have been helpful if the author had also drawn into his discussion details from the available pollen records and similar kinds of proxy environmental indicators.

There follow six chapters devoted to reviewing the archaeological sequence and cultural history of the region from the emergence the first food producing communities to the occupation of Mashonaland and Matebeleland by Cecil Rhodes' British South Africa Company in 1890. Each chapter summarises the origins and subsequent development of the successive archaeological 'cultures', their main artefactual and architectural characteristics, economic base and inferred social and symbolic systems. For the later periods, essentially post-1450 following the demise of Great Zimbabwe as the major centre of political and religious authority, Pikirayi also draws on the available historical sources, both written and oral, and assesses these against the relevant archaeological data. Each chapter ends with a summary, in which the defining features of each phase are restated. In his final chapter, Pikirayi provides a useful overview of the historical significance of the Zimbabwe Plateau and its successive political formations, using this also to examine the relative importance at different times of some of the classic archaeological 'prime movers' of state formation--such as long distance trade, environmental change, and religion and ideology.

Over all, both students and specialists of the archaeology of the region will find this a useful book, and I would recommend it to anyone unfamiliar with the later archaeology of southern Africa in search of a general up-to-date overview of the period. Equally, Pikirayi's book is a valuable addition to the corpus of case studies concerned with examination of the varied processes and historical trajectories of state formation in different parts of the world. There are, of course, omissions and imbalances. Thus, for instance, in much more could have been said about the interaction between resident Later Stone Age hunter-gatherer populations and the first farming and herding communities. Equally, there is no significant discussion of the extensive literature on the symbolism of iron production processes. While Pikirayi provides a useful summary of the archaeological traces of Portuguese colonial and commercial activity in the region, it was surprising to find no discussion of the historical archaeology of nineteenth-century settlements, especially the recent extensive work that has been conducted at the former Ndebele capital of Old Bulawayo. These are minor quibbles, however, and in no way detract from the usefulness of this book.

Paul Lane

British Institute in Eastern Africa, PO Box

30 710, Nairobi, Kenya

(Email: pjlane@insightkenya.com)