The Anthropocene of Madagascar: Reviewing Chronological Evidence for Madagascar’s Colonization

Summary

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, Madagascar was thought to have been settled around 1500 BP by iron-using agriculturalists from SE Asia. Recent archaeological findings, however, suggest that foraging groups reached the island by as early as ca. 4000 BP, if not earlier. Such early dates for Madagascar force us to reconsider models of the island’s colonization, particularly in terms of the nature and rate of anthropogenic impact on its biotic communities. In this paper we review chronological evidence for the settlement of Madagascar, applying standards of chronometric hygiene that have been used to refine the settlement histories of islands in the Caribbean and Pacific. This review allows us to more productively compare the colonization of Madagascar to other island colonization scenarios around the world.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• The Island Anthropocene

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 14730