Misha nedzimba On homesteads and households

Abstract

The designation of Great Zimbabwe as a ruin, a relic, and as an archaeological site created a long-lasting but unfortunate impression that the site is an abandoned group of settlements and not a lived and living landscape or shrine. This chapter provides an understanding of the nature of homesteads and, by inference, household activities performed by those that made Great Zimbabwe their home. It creates debate on ideas from which the household archaeology of Great Zimbabwe might be understood, discussed, and even contested. Although household archaeology in regions such as Latin America is well advanced compared to southern Africa, interpretation relies heavily on leads from the recent historical and ethnographic insights. Insights from the recent past suggest that groups that collectively make up the Shona used a form of collective action and communitarian labour provisioning to mobilise work at the household and community levels.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 0 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.