Great Zimbabwe's Forgotten Farmers: The Agrarian Revolution

We often think of Great Zimbabwe as a city of stone and gold, but its foundation was agriculture. In this episode, Lucas and Luna explore the farming practices that sustained the kingdom for centuries: the cultivation of sorghum, millet, and cowpeas, the use of iron hoes and cattle manure, and the ingenious dry-stone terraces that transformed the Zimbabwe Plateau into a breadbasket. They discuss how climate shifts and soil exhaustion may have contributed to the kingdom's decline, and what archaeological evidence—from grain bins to pollen cores—reveals about daily life. Along the way, they touch on the role of the mambo in controlling food distribution, the sacred importance of the first harvest, and the resilience of Shona farming traditions that persist today. #GreatZimbabwe #Shona #Agriculture #IronAge #Sorghum #Millet #Cowpeas #Terraces #ClimateChange #SoilExhaustion #Mambo #FirstHarvest #ZimbabwePlateau #Archaeology #PollenCore #FoodSecurity #History #FexingoHistory #ShonaCivilization #MedievalAfrica Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo