Complex societies flourished on the central plateau of southern Africa from the ninth through sixteenth centuries. Their regional political centers, called zimbabwes, were city-states enclosed within stone walls, which still exist as archaeological monuments. Great Zimbabwe, the largest of these, was the product of a highly stratified society whose ruling class wielded the zimbabwe economic system that is actually the most crucial element in understanding Great Zimbabwe’s achievements.
During the fourteenth century, the population of Great Zimbabwe probably exceeded 10,000. This was an extraordinary size for a city at that time in an environment of typical African savanna woodland, because the only system of crop cultivation these soils could support was one that involved long fallow periods between plantings, a pattern of centralized control over the society, with cattle becoming the property of a ruling class.
Ordinary people were given use of individual cattle as an act of royal patronage. Because cattle exchange was an essential element in marriage contracts, the power of the royal class reached deep into everyone’s lives. Similarly, the crucial role of cattle also explains Great Zimbabwe’s successful mining industry. Gold is found in to laborers that royalty was able to muster the human resources necessary for large-scale gold mining.
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