Settling Madagascar: When did People First Colonize the World's Largest Island?

Summary

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 than the first widespread archaeologically visible traces of human presence in the late first millennium AD. If true, this has important implications for the antiquity of trans-Indian Ocean contacts, the navigational skills of late Holocene Africans, the timing and causation of megafaunal extinctions, and the overall impact of people on Madagascar’s ecology. Building on work by Anderson et al. (2018), this paper assesses the published archaeological and palaeoenvironmental basis for this proposition. Applying well-established criteria for dating and evaluating claims of human activity in comparable situations (pre-Clovis sites in the Americas; Polynesian settlement of New Zealand and Remote Oceania), it concludes that there is no compelling evidence that people were present on Madagascar before the mid-first millennium AD. Such a ‘short’ chronology fits much better with the wider pattern of Indian Ocean contacts currently available.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• African Archaeology throughout the Holocene   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23306