When science alone is not enough: Radiocarbon timescales, history, ethnography and elite settlements in southern Africa

The southern African recent past is replete with examples of elite settlements, some of which were occupied sequentially, and by different rulers. Shona, Venda and Tswana traditions identify the many dry stone walled capitals with former kings who ruled during different reigns. This historical reality is often not factored when considering the issues of political centres and urbanism in the Iron Age. The resolution of radiocarbon dating produces an aggregate time that conflates the chronology of capitals or elite centres when they may not have been contemporary - 'the suck in and smear' phenomenon described by Baillie (1991). This article combines historical and archaeological information to develop an alternative explanation for the existence of hundreds of elite Zimbabwe settlements, some of which were synchronous according to the radiocarbon chronology. The main indication is that rather than suffering from a glut of elites, southern African urban and political centres are associated with individual leaders of competing polities which may not have been part of unified hierarchical and sequential structures. The archaeology of the region stands to benefit from understanding the dynamics of politics, power and leadership in this way.