Towards an Understanding of Spatiotemporal Dynamics at Great Zimbabwe

In 1987 archaeologists from nine African countries and colleagues from Sweden began a co-operation programme to study urbanism in eastern and southern Africa under the auspices of The Urban Origins programme. The programme involved 22 parallel field projects throughout the West Indian Ocean region and the southern Africa interior. The article presents a compilation of diverse material on Great Zimbabwe that has been scattered in different fora. The research was directed by an overall approach that investigations in urban archaeology in Africa must be at the same scale that people lived in the past. The results briefly presented here show the potential of multivariate assessments of the spatial distributions of large-scale urban sites in Africa.