Beyond Great Zimbabwe: Overlooked expressions of complexity in Iron Age Southern Africa

For over a century, scholarship on the emergence of early cities and states in Iron Age Southern Africa has been dominated by research at a few prominent centers, particularly Great Zimbabwe, Mapungubwe, and Khami. These large collectives, widely celebrated in global archaeological literature and popular media, have often been portrayed as powerful territorial states that represent the earliest and most definitive expressions of sociopolitical complexity in the region that radiated outward into surrounding landscapes. Within this interpretive framework, neighboring regions such as Mberengwa have frequently been cast as marginal “peripheries” whose inhabitants were presumed to have limited political or economic autonomy. Drawing on new artefactual, spatial, and chronological data generated through recent archaeological fieldwork at the sites of Chumnungwa, Chesvingo, and Kongezi, I challenge these entrenched centre–periphery interpretations. The evidence demonstrates that Zimbabwe culture communities in Mberengwa were not passive satellites but dynamic and influential actors who actively shaped regional sociopolitical and economic processes during the Late Iron Age. Far from being isolated, these communities were deeply entangled in multiple layers of interaction—local, regional, and interregional—including exchange systems linked to the wider Indian Ocean world. In this regard, the Iron Age communities of Mberengwa participated in the same broad economic and cultural networks that connected the well-known Zimbabwe culture capitals. By synthesizing new archaeological evidence with existing scholarship, I reposition Mberengwa as a landscape that hosted powerful and autonomous polities. The region exhibits monumental architecture and a range of material symbols of authority comparable to those found at major Zimbabwe culture centers such as Great Zimbabwe. These findings demonstrate that the development of sociopolitical complexity within the Zimbabwe culture was far more geographically dispersed and locally negotiated than previously assumed. Ultimately, I argue that the long-standing characterization of regions like Mberengwa as “peripheral” reflects not archaeological reality but rather the consequences of historical research bias. When investigated with sustained archaeological attention, these landscapes emerge as vibrant and influential components of the broader Zimbabwe culture, contributing actively to the political, economic, and cultural dynamics of southern Africa during the Iron Age.