The School of Humanities invites you to an online seminar entitled Agglomeration, disintegration and social distancing: Covid-19 and the archaeological lessons on communicable diseases, population size and settlement organisation at the Great Zimbabwe by Dr Foreman Bandama.

Whether plagues reached Great Zimbabwe or not, this cannot be answered now due to several reasons.

Beyond paleoepidemiology, traditional proxies for archaeological contagion and their effects are not helpful and Great Zimbabwe’s data lacks the goodness-of-fit to explore these indicators.

This seminar is a reflective study on how recent findings on the site’s population size, density and settlement organisation would fare against a contagion of the nature of Covid-19.

Without cause-effect correlations, the discussion will also draw from historical Shona responses to epidemics to calibrate the archaeology of the site.

The seminar will take place as follows:

Date: Wednesday 1 July 2020

Time: 16h00 

Event Format: MS Teams Meeting (Click here to join the event)

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