This one isn’t so much a tale of accidents in archaeology as it is an example of blatant racism, white-supremacist thinking, and complete idiocy in archaeology. It’s also a perfect example of the incomprehensible need to rewrite history to glorify one’s ancestors and beliefs.
The long-abandoned site known as Great Zimbabwe lies in what is now southeastern modern Zimbabwe. After its construction some time between 1200 and 1400 CE, the city served as the capital to a large and complex local civilization. Great Zimbabwe is best characterized by its high stone walls up to 30 feet tall surrounding the main area of the city and creating several enclosures within. These walls were built without mortar—but they still stand today—and are adorned with soapstone bird sculptures. In their entirety, the hilltop palace and surrounding city covered about 1800 acres and would have had the capacity to house more than 10,000 people before it was abandoned around 1500 (likely due to famine). And contrary to initial beliefs, this city was completely untouched by European influence.
However, the inhabitants of Great Zimbabwe were by no means isolated. Discoveries made during the excavation of the site revealed evidence of trade with many cultures. Among the artifacts were pottery shards, gold working equipment, ironware, Arab coins, Chinese porcelain, and Persian beads. The traders that did business with the inhabitants of Great Zimbabwe spread tales of the city to other populations. This gave rise to many speculations and myths; some thought it was a biblical city built by the Queen of Sheba, and others thought it was the seat of a mythological Christian ruler named Prester John.
In 1871, the first of the idiots arrived at Great Zimbabwe. Karl Mauch, a “German Indiana Jones type,” came with a preconceived notion that the remains belonged to a civilized (read: white) society. In what may be the most poorly-founded conclusion ever seen in archaeology, Mauch concluded that since the hue of the wooden crossbeams matched that of his pencil, the wood used in the crossbeams must be cedar from Lebanon. He then used this conclusion to hypothesize that the Queen of Sheba once lived in Great Zimbabwe.
This theory caught on with Cecil Rhodes, head of the British South Africa Company, who funded another investigation of the site—to be led by James Bent, another idiot. Bent concluded that the city was built by a prehistoric northern race from Arabia. Next we come to idiot number four, arguably (or in my opinion, conclusively) the biggest idiot of all. Richard Hall, a local journalist—let me reiterate: a local journalist—began “excavating” the site. Instead of preserving it, he dug up a 3 to 12 foot layer of archaeological evidence across the site to remove “the filth and decadence of the Kaffir occupation.” He completely ignored every archaeological protocol that has been put in place to preserve evidence, disregarding stratification and disposing of artifacts.
This magnificent display of imbecility left very little for actually qualified scientists to use in future analyses. Luckily, in the first scientific excavation of the site from 1905 to 1906, David McIver was able to conclude that the “mud dwellings within the stone enclosures were definitely African in origin and dated to the middle ages.” Later data found and presented in 1929 by archaeologist (look, an actual scientist!) Gertrude Caton-Thompson backed McIver’s claims and dated settlement of Great Zimbabwe to 1100 CE.
But that just couldn’t be the end of it. Scholars continued to debate the origins of the site, some proposing inhabitants from Malay or Indonesia. The Rhodesian government in the 1960s suppressed archaeological theories of black settlement and any papers suggesting African origin had to “equally address the possibility of Phoenician or Semitic builders.” Finally, the myth of European origin was put to rest in 1973 when archaeologist (wow, another qualified scientist!) Peter Garlake wrote the definitive book on Great Zimbabwe and, once and for all, concluded that the city was founded not by whites, but by black Africans.
Source: http://the-sieve.com/2013/08/15/bad-archaeology-the-queen-of-sheba-and-a-water-park/
I really enjoyed reading your post and only wish I had more time to learn about it. History is such a distorted thing, seen through the eyes of the conquerors. But I really like how you address this, and I learned a lot!
History is always so hard because it’s usually written through the eyes of a white male with the preconceived notion that his homeland is the only civilized homeland (smh). I’m glad that archaeologists are always double checking each others’ works and learning more about each site or else we would have been left with such a biased analysis of every ancient site. I remember one story where some natives warned settlers about some incoming storm or something by saying that the animals told them and the settlers were all “wow natives and their spiritual connections wow wow wow ” when in reality the natives just looked at the animals retreating to the higher grounds and followed haha