Great Zimbabwe was a series of hundreds of stone ruins forming an ancient city in an area in Zimbabwe, in southern Africa, built between the 11th century and 15th century as a trading hub but eventually was abandoned. While modern scholarship believes that the city was built by Bantu-speaking ancestors of the Shona, colonial era scholarship believed that the city had been built by non-blacks. While introduced to the western world in the late 1800's, the first archaeological expeditions to the ruins were made in 1905-1906. In 1980, upon full independence, the new nation renamed itself Zimbabwe after these ruins.