For most of the 19th century the Zulu Kingdom was the largest and most influential indigenous state in Southern Africa.

Rare amongst African states, the Zulu Kingdom’s short existence spanned the pre-colonial and colonial eras. The kingdom took shape in 1816 when Shaka kaSenzangakhona, newly installed chief of the Zulu, began to consolidate surrounding chiefdoms through diplomacy or by force following the collapse of the powerful Ndwandwe chiefdom at the turn of the century. By the 1830s, during the reign of King Shaka’s brother Dingane kaSenzangakhona, the kingdom was bordered by British, Voortrekker, and Portuguese settlers. The accounts of traders, hunters, shipwrecked sailors, travellers, missionaries, settlers, and colonial officials spanning much of this time produced a rich, and biased, record of the kingdom and ‘Zulu’ people. It is, at once, amongst the best known states historically in southern Africa, and the least understood archaeologically.

The Zulu Kingdom Archaeology Project (ZKAP) has two main objectives.

• First, we aim to continue the shift in emphasis away from the stories of kings, battles, and European interests towards the peoples and places ‘without history.’ We are more interested in the lives and homes of the so-called ‘muted masses’ that made up the majority of the kingdom, those scarcely known from historical accounts.
• Second, this project is designed to correct the imbalance of evidence about life in the kingdom during its era of independence, from around 1816 to 1879, and the decades leading to its formation. To accomplish this, we combine archaeology, archaeological science, history, and genetics to investigate what is was like to live within and outside the company of kings.