Professor David Norman Beach has since the early 1970s collected oral traditions of the Shona-speaking peoples of the Zimbabwe Plateau and read sixteenth century and later Portuguese documents relating to the same region and the lower Zambezi. During the course of his research he made some archaeological statements whose usefulness has been realised by both archaeologists and prehistorians devoted to the study of Zimbabwe's past. This article evaluates some of his publications, and tries to assess his contribution to the field of Zimbabwean archaeology.
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