Southern Rhodesia has, for the past thousand years or so, been inhabited mainly by a number of tribes which, for our present purpose, we may group together as the Shona people, together with a nineteenth-century immigrant people of Zulu extraction known as the Ndebele. The earliest historical records tell us nothing of other peoples having lived here previously, and the information given us by mediaeval travellers presents a picture blurred in outline and limited in extent. In this country, therefore, the prehistoric period may be said to have existed almost until our own time. Viewed in this light, the vast numbers of ancient ruins with which the colony abounds belong to the prehistoric period. We do, however, know that these ruins, even at the most liberal computation, cannot be remotely old, and the most competent investigators are of the opinion that they are of mediaeval age and of Bantu origin. To this conclusion they have been led by a detailed study of the objects found in them, which indicate a comparatively advanced state of development. At the time when they were built the art of working in iron was generally practised; the art of building in stone had been acquired; agriculture and animal husbandry were practised, and contacts had been established with countries outside Africa, whence came many imported objects. Between that time and the time when the earliest representatives of the human race first came to seek out new hunting grounds in a country uninhabited save for the wild animals of the veld, there was a vast interval, measured by thousands of years, during which the human race developed by slow and painful degrees from the simplest imaginable beginnings to a highly complex mode of life. While, therefore, we might quite rightly include our ruins within the prehistoric period, it is convenient to make a separation, using the term “protohistoric” for the later period, and reserving the term “prehistoric” for the earlier. There is, so far as we can ascertain, no overlapping between the two, except in so far as it is possible that the people of the stone-building period might have arrived at a time when the last of the Stone Age peoples were on the point of disappearing.