Great Zimbabwe

20.2667°S, 30.9333°E.

Stone city in the southeastern hills of modern Zimbabwe, occupied from approximately 1100 to 1450 CE as the capital of the Kingdom of Zimbabwe (estimated peak population 18,000). The Great Enclosure is the largest pre-colonial stone structure in sub-Saharan Africa: an elliptical wall 250 metres in circumference, 11 metres tall and 5 metres thick at its base, built from approximately one million dressed granite blocks fitted without mortar. The conical tower inside it, 9.1 metres tall, has no documented entrance and unknown function. Trade goods recovered include Chinese Ming porcelain, Persian glass, and Arab coins, indicating direct or indirect Indian Ocean trade. The city was abandoned around 1450 CE for reasons not fully explained — possibly resource exhaustion or political fragmentation. European colonial archaeologists from the 1890s through the 1970s repeatedly attributed Great Zimbabwe to non-African builders despite the evidence; the colonial government suppressed archaeological reports correcting the record.

A million stones cut and stacked without mortar by Iron Age Africans were attributed to anyone-but-Africans for ninety years, in writing.