The Origins and Spread of Dry Laid, Stone-Walled Architecture in Pre-colonial Southern Africa

2012/06/01 by Karim Sadr · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Archaeology and Rock Art Studies #Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology

paper · doi:10.1080/03057070.2012.683697

openalex publication_date 2012/06/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29

Abstract

Pre-colonial stone-walled structures (SWS) are some of the most visible and accessible archaeological remains in southern Africa. Great Zimbabwe is the best known, but there are many tens or even a few hundreds of thousands of other SWS scattered throughout the subcontinent. What is their origin? Did this architectural style and concept arise from a single source or several independent ones? There are different views on these matters and they are described in the first section of this article. In the second part, I suggest that one of the roots of SWS in southern Africa lies in the Later Stone Age (LSA) cultures from the western half of the subcontinent. The article concludes with a brief report of an ongoing project to discover the sequence in the development of SWS in the high plains from the Witwatersrand to the Vaal River.

Cited by

• Architecture of Zimbabwe [wikipedia]

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