Have you ever wondered where Pablo Picasso received his inspiration for his modern abstract art? The answer might just surprise you.

An African tribe known as the Shona has an ancient artistic tradition stretching back over eight centuries to the time of the Great Zimbabwe (the word means "stone houses"). The Great Zimbabwe was a sprawling 1800-acre stone city that at one time was home to perhaps 40,000 people. Amazingly, the walls of this massive ruin are still standing despite the fact that the original builders fitted the stones together using only dry-stone techniques — that is, without mortar of any kind!

Within the ruins are the precursors of today's art: massive six-foot stone carvings of birds dating back nearly a millennium. While today's Shona sculptors typically work on a less monumental scale, they may still travel considerable distances to find and quarry their own raw materials. Many of the stones come from near The Great Dyke: a 2.5 billion year old band of volcanic ridges and hills running nearly 350 miles through the center of the country, the longest linear mass of volcanic rock on the planet.

Commonly used stones, drawn from The Great Dyke and the Nyanga Range, include granite, leopard stone, opal stone, and especially serpentine, which has a range of over 200 colors!

After quarrying the stone with hatchets, Shona sculptors use chisels and files to rough out the image, typically working directly on the stone without preliminary sketches. Sculptors regard this process as “releasing the spirits" trapped within the rock. After refining the surface with wet and dry sandpaper, sculptors heat the stone and apply beeswax to bring out the color variations, then polish their work to a high shine.

Shona sculptures include subjects such as birds, animals, mythological entities, and family groups. The modern Shona style has a strong abstract component, and it is said that Pablo Picasso was an admirer of early Shona work. In fact if you take a close look at some of the sculptures shown here, you can clearly see the similarities of artistic style.

You can see a collection of Shona stone sculptures at http://www.paintedcreatures.com/shona.