Malaria in the African Indian Ocean Islands: Prospects and Challenges for Biomolecular Archaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Islands around Africa: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Malaria remains one of the most devastating infectious diseases affecting human populations, with over 200 million cases and 500,000 deaths annually worldwide, most of which focused on the mainlands of sub-Saharan Africa. While malaria is an “old” disease on the mainland dating back tens of thousands of years, its history on the African islands of the Indian Ocean is thought to be much more recent, closely intertwined and impacted by human migrations. In this talk, I will discuss the prospects and challenges for biomolecular studies of the history of malaria on the African Indian Ocean islands. The focus will be the island of Mauritius, where a severe malaria epidemic in 1867 killed some 41,000 people, representing ~10% of the island’s total population at the time. I will present results from a pilot paleogenomic study on human remains from the Bois Marchand Cemetery, established in 1867 due to the malaria epidemic.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Islands around Africa: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 41472.0