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Mikhail Polyakov

Chinese pottery in Great Zimbabwe: what it says about the trade links of a medieval African state and what it does not prove

Level: BeginnerReading time: 5 min

Topics: History

Fragments of jade-green glazed pottery on the sand of an excavation beside an archaeologist's brush, with a wall of dark stone blocks in the background

The short answer: during new excavations at Great Zimbabwe, the former capital of an African state, fragments of green Chinese pottery were found. Live Science treats this as a sign that the state had long-distance links with East Asia. But the find itself shows only one thing: such objects somehow got there. Who brought them and how is not stated in the source. Below: what exactly was found, what other traces of long-distance links are known and what in this story remains a guess.

What was found

There is one source: a Live Science article connected with the PBS documentary "Secrets of the Dead: Africa's Golden City". According to the text, the film premiered in the US on Wednesday, 14 October. I have not read the scientific publication about the pottery itself and have not watched the film.

  • Where. Great Zimbabwe is in the south-east of present-day Zimbabwe. It is the capital of a state that emerged around 1000 AD. This people left no written history, so little is known about them.
  • What exactly. Archaeologists found fragments of jade-green Chinese pottery. A shard of green pottery found on a hillside is examined by the head of the excavation, Shadreck Chirikure of the University of Oxford, and Oxford doctoral student Muchen Zhou (according to Live Science, this is a scene from a clip of the documentary).
  • What kind of pottery. The style is called Longquan celadon. It began to be made in eastern China from around 950. According to the text, the glossy sheen of the shard suggests the vessel was fired at a very high temperature. The text notes that at the time only China knew how to do this.
  • How much. Chirikure says celadon is found all over Great Zimbabwe, but in small quantities.

How archaeologists read it

Two conclusions are drawn from this, and both are presented cautiously in the source.

  1. The pottery was a rarity. Because it is found in small quantities, Chirikure considers the Chinese ware rare. He adds that "perhaps it was used by the elite", and calls such objects highly valued exotica. The word "perhaps" in this conclusion is his, and it does not follow from the shards themselves.
  2. The city was connected with distant lands. This is the article's general conclusion, which rests not on a single find but on several kinds of evidence, listed below.

Other traces of long-distance trade

Live Science lists other signs of long-distance links at Great Zimbabwe. The metal objects from Congo are given in the text in Chirikure's words; the other points are set out without a direct attribution to him.

  • archaeologists had already found glass objects from South-East Asia, India and the Middle East that were brought by sea;
  • metal objects from the area of present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo, about 2,000 kilometres away;
  • copper and tin from the area of present-day South Africa, more than 500 kilometres away;
  • chemical analysis of cattle bones showed that some of the animals were traded across an area of about 140 kilometres.

Chirikure estimates the distance from India or Sri Lanka to Great Zimbabwe at no less than 8,000 kilometres. According to the text, merchants sailed the Indian Ocean using the winds brought by the monsoon cycles. He also says that water is usually thought of as something that separated people, but in this story it connected them.

Why this story matters for history itself

In the late 19th century Great Zimbabwe was first excavated and quickly plundered by British colonists for ivory, metal and gold. According to the film, they claimed the city had been built not by Africans but by Phoenicians, and used this to justify taking the finds to England. Today many of the objects are held in the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. The new excavations, according to the same account, show a developed and well-connected African power that flourished from the 11th century until at least the 15th century. It disappeared, as the text says, about 500 years after it emerged. The reason may have been that the population grew too large for the dry, overworked land. This is a hypothesis, not an established fact.

What here is a find and what is a conclusion

This is my own breakdown, not words from the article.

  1. The find. Fragments of green Chinese pottery at the excavation where Chirikure's team works.
  2. The identification. The Longquan celadon style, which was produced in China. The sheen of the shard, according to the text, suggests a high firing temperature.
  3. The assumption. The pottery was perhaps used by the elite. These are Chirikure's words with the qualifier "perhaps"; the source does not say whom it belonged to.
  4. The conclusion. Great Zimbabwe took part in long-distance trade, and different kinds of evidence point to this, not only the pottery.

What is missing from the source: the age of the shards themselves, their number, the route by which they arrived, and an answer to whether they were paid for with gold, ivory or something else.

How to read news like this. Ask yourself what exactly the find tells you: where the object was made, or how it got to the site. A shard says nothing about the second on its own, and in this story the conclusion about trade rests on several kinds of evidence, not on one.

Summary

At Great Zimbabwe, fragments of Chinese glazed pottery were found, of a kind made in China from around 950. Together with glass from Asia and the Middle East, metals from other parts of Africa and the trading of cattle, this points to developed trade. That the pottery was used by the elite remains an assumption of the head of the excavation. Details on the age and number of the shards have to be looked for in the team's scientific publications, which are not in the source.

See also another piece in this section: The new dinosaur Musango from Zimbabwe.

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