Transported Landscapes and Globalized Foodways in the Settlement of Western Indian Ocean Islands

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeobotany of Early Peopling: Plant Experimentation and Cultural Inheritance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Food is often used as a marker of social and cultural identity, reflecting deeply embedded traditions of taste, technology, and social relations. Crops that moved as part of migration and resettlement processes thereby often played more than an economic role, being central to the creation and negotiation of memory and identity in new social contexts. This paper uses archaeobotanical evidence from the islands of Madagascar and the Comoros in the western Indian Ocean to explore the region’s dynamic history of settlement, trade, and cross-cultural interaction involving peoples from Africa to southeastern Asia. Waves of migration and exchange saw the introduction not only of new crops to the region, but methods of cultivation and social practices that formed important “bundles of knowledge” that also moved with the plants. In-progress research aimed at investigating complementary evidence of ceramic production and consumption, as well as broader landscape-level transformations resulting from the introduction of transported landscapes to these islands, is also outlined.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Archaeobotany of Early Peopling: Plant Experimentation and Cultural Inheritance   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39921.0