Island Colonization (Other Keyword)
1-6 (6 Records)
The date of Madagascar’s initial settlement has long been the subject of academic inquiry and debate. Archaeologists, historians, geneticists, linguists and paleoecologists interested in the history of Malagasy and Indian Ocean peoples, regional exchange, and environmental change have contributed diverse datasets and perspectives to this debate over Madagascar’s colonization, but consensus on the timing of human arrival remains elusive. Despite its relative proximity to the African mainland,...
Early Human-Environment Dynamics on the Southwest Coast of Madagascar (2015)
This paper discusses early occupations of the southwest coast of Madagascar and the impact that human subsistence practices may have had on the highly endemic spiny forest biome. A major transformation of Madagascar’s environment post-human arrival is the extinction of a suite of mega fauna species. Ongoing work on the spread of domesticates throughout the western Indian Ocean will certainly improve our understanding of Madagascar’s settlement history, but little is known to-date about the...
Northern Norway’s sea of islands: processes of maritime colonization and settlement (2017)
Epeli Hau’ofa’s (1993) perception of Oceania as a ‘sea of islands’ is a useful point of departure for exploring the long-term trajectories of the many thousands of islands scattered along the coast of northwestern Norway. Hau’ofa’s vision of joined islands is also instructive as a way of emphasizing seaborne connectivity rather than insularity within maritime archaeology. This paper highlights problems related to island colonization and settlement since the Early Mesolithic (11,500-10,000 BP) in...
On the Edge of the New World: Colonizing the Bahamas (2017)
The Bahama archipelago is the last place colonized in the New World, and the first encountered by Europeans. Previous efforts to explain the arrival of humans followed the stepping-stone model of expansion that began in the Orinoco River drainage of lowland Venezuela. Communities island-hopped through the Lesser Antilles, expanded into the Greater Antilles, and continued their northward migration through the southern Bahamas after crossing the last open water gap between Hispaniola and the Turks...
The Palaeoenvironmental Impacts of Neolithic Colonization: Assessing Recent Palynological Data from the Mediterranean Islands (2017)
The Mediterranean islands were colonized sporadically ~12–4.5 kbp by agropastoralists practicing mixed cereal, pulse, and fruit farming augmented by husbandry of ovicaprids, pig, and cattle. While the timing of these colonization events is relatively well-understood, the palaeonenvironmental impacts of the introduction of this Neolithic package are not, particularly in terms of relative uniformity or variability. Here, we collate the available radiometrically-anchored palynological data for the...
Re-assessing island colonization and exploitation in the Late Pleistocene-Early Holocene Mediterranean (2016)
In 1981 one of us (Cherry) first attempted to tease out spatial and temporal patterning in the colonization of the Mediterranean islands by human communities. Since the 1980s, slowly accumulating evidence has suggested that the Mediterranean islands were sporadically exploited by hunter-gatherer-fishers (HGF) during the Epipalaeolithic and Mesolithic. Here, adapting principles from island biogeography, we seek to establish whether or not these patchy data exhibit patterning. We suggest that the...