Abstract
IN this handsome and copiously illustrated volume are A embodied the results of six years' (1895-1900) systematic exploration amongst the numerous prehistoric remains of all kinds which are widely scattered over the whole region between the Zambesi and the Limpopo, and even range at some points into the conterminous districts of North Transvaal and Bechuanaland. During the operations, which were conducted under grants from the Chartered Company licensing these researches, the authors, with their indefatigable colleague, Mr. George Johnson, personally inspected nearly two hundred ruins, a list of which is here given and a great many of which are described in more or less detail. They further tell us that, so far from being completed, the work of exploration has scarcely been more than well begun, that their precursors and contemporaries—Bent, Mauch, Baines, Maund, Willoughby, Swan, Schlichter, White—have merely scratched the surface, and that of more than five hundred temples, cjtadels, enclosures, chains of forts, gold workings and terraced slopes reported from various districts and covering a total area of at least 115,000 square miles, not a tenth part has yet been thoroughly ooexamined. This will be read with surprise by those archæologists who supposed that after Bent and Swan's classical descriptions of the “Great Zimbabwe” and a few neighbouring monuments, little more remained to be discovered. But the statement is supported by abundant first-hand evidence, and it is shown that Zimbabwe itself “is still practically unexplored,” while elsewhere the original floors of the earlier structures still rest for the most part buried under ten or even fifteen feet of the accumulated debris of ages.
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KEANE, A. Rhodesia and Ophir 1 . Nature 66, 34–35 (1902). https://doi.org/10.1038/066034a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/066034a0