Madagascar (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristina Douglass. Henry Wright. Robert Dewar.

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,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alison Crowther. Nicole Boivin. Leilani Lucas. Henry Wright. Chantal Radimilahy.

Although Madagascar is probably best known for its unique endemic flora and fauna, humans have also played a key role in shaping biological diversity on the island. Indeed, it is estimated that humans have been responsible for the introduction of some 10% of Madagascar’s flora in the centuries since the island was first colonised. For many of these plants, the precise dates of introduction are unknown; and while many are undoubtedly relatively recent introductions, a number are suggested to have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristina Douglass.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maurice Bloch.

This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zoë Crossland.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Black Studies and Archaeology" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Drawing on work by Alexander G. Weheliye and Achille Mbembe this paper considers the ways in which Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben’s notions of biopower and biopolitics have been theorized in relation to Western European modernity and forms of sovereignty over life. What kind of challenge is posed to these genealogies when we consider...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victor Raharijaona. Susan Kus.

Over past centuries the landscape of the central highlands of Madagascar has been dramatically transformed. Draining, diking and terracing have created vast expanses of irrigated rice fields where forests once stood. The employ of this transformative technology depended on collective social labor; unsurprisingly the dikes that rendered the land productive also served in the political organization and unification of territory and populations. Yet, the destruction of these dikes was also a ploy...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean Hixon. Emma Elliott Smith. Brooke Crowley. Richard Bankoff. Douglas Kennett.

Early human colonists of Madagascar encountered a diverse endemic fauna during the late Holocene that included elephant birds, pygmy hippos, and giant lemurs. All fauna >10 kg went extinct in the past 1,000-2,000 years. Direct human predation and anthropogenic landscape change help explain aspects of the extinction pattern. Increasing aridity may have also played a role in some regions, but its contribution remains controversial. We track changes in aridity during the past 4,000 years in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Geoff Clarke. Aaron Camens. Simon Haberle. Atholl Anderson.

Human impacts to Madagascar, through the introduction of non-native species, habitat modification and species extinctions, are thought to have begun in the prehistoric period. Understanding of these anthropogenic modifications to Madagascar’s ecosystems is, however, impossible without solid chronologies for human settlement and expansion across the island, which are currently lacking. Estimates of the period in which people first colonized Madagascar have varied considerably, and never more so...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristina Douglass.

This paper discusses resource exploitation patterns at coastal archaeological sites located in the Velondriake Marine Protected Area in southwest Madagascar. In particular, it assesses the selective reliance of coastal communities on a variety of local habitats and taxa. The data are derived from regional survey and the excavation of five archaeological sites, including small rock shelters and open-air sites, ranging in date from ca. AD 800 to 1900. The data describe multiple narratives of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Mitchell.

This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Madagascar constitutes a major anomaly in the history of human colonization: 400 km from the African mainland, but with a population whose culture, language, and genes derive substantially from Indonesia, more than 7000 km away. Recently, the argument has gained ground that the island was settled (perhaps from Africa) significantly earlier...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Kus. Victor Raharijaoana.

This contribution involves a re-examination of assertions we have made in the past concerning "religion", "belief" and "ideology: jettisoning some, reasserting others, and offering "refinements" where appropriate. Often limited cultural exposure to a circumscript terrain of contemporary religions in service of the state contributes significantly to the initial framing of our questions (and attendant expectation of answers). One of our lives, embedded in context in rural and urban Madagascar,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristina G. Douglass. Tanambelo Rasolondrainy.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology in the Indian Ocean" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In this paper we describe a collaboration between environmental archaeologists and Vezo historians from the Velondriake region of southwest Madagascar. The project aims to integrate archaeological data from surveys and excavations and oral histories pertaining to Vezo livelihoods, settlements and migrations, in order to reconstruct...