Behavioral Ecology and Evolutionary Approaches to Human-Environment Dynamics on Southwest Madagascar

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Madagascar’s southwestern coast has been inhabited by coastal foraging and fishing populations for over a millennium. Despite significant environmental changes in southwest Madagascar’s environment following human settlement, little is known about the scale, pace, and nature of human settlement and subsequent landscape modification. Recent investigations have systematically surveyed and excavated large swaths of the Velondriake Marine Protected Area, located in the southwest of Madagascar. These studies have made use of satellite remote sensing, predictive modeling guided by human behavioral ecology and niche construction frameworks, and regional survey and excavation strategies. In total, our investigations have recorded hundreds of new archaeological deposits and dozens of new radiocarbon dates that improve our understanding of the region’s settlement chronology and distributional patterns. Our results demonstrate that coastal foraging communities in southwest Madagascar settled the landscape in ways that largely follow ideal free distribution and Allee effect principles, demonstrated by settlement density and chronological information. Additionally, over the past 1,000 years, communities have extensively altered the landscape in terms of soil and vegetative characteristics.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36035.0