Henry T. Wright

The culture history of Madagascar

Madagascars culture is a unique fusion of elements drawn from the western, northern, and eastern shores of the Indian Ocean, and its past has fascinated many scholars, yet systematic archaeological research is relatively recent on the island. The oldest traces of visitors are from the first century AD. Coastal settlements, with clear evidence of ties to the western Indian Ocean trading network, were established in several places over the next millennium. Important environmental changes of both plant and animal communities are documented over this period, including the extinctions of almost all large animal species. Urban life in Madagascar began with the establishment of the entrepôt of Mahilaka on the northwest coast of the island in the twelfth century. At about the same time, communities with ties to the trade network were established around the islands coasts. From the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, social hierarchies developed in several regions of the island. During the succeeding two centuries, Madagascar saw the development of state polities.

Settlement Patterns and Development of Social Complexity in the Yiluo Region, North China

Abstract This international, collaborative, and interdisciplinary archaeological program examines changes in settlement patterns from the early Neolithic to the full development of states (ca. 6500–200 B.C.) in the Yiluo region of central north China. Full-coverage regional surveys are integrated with geoarchaeological investigations, ethnobotanical studies, and lithic analyses. The data are used to assess changes in population, environment, land use, agricultural production, and craft production, and to test theoretical propositions regarding the emergence and development of social complexity. Research results suggest a significant sociopolitical transformation taking place in the Yiluo basin during the Erlitou period, including the development of the first four-tiered settlement hierarchy, marked population nucleation, and economic integration between urban center and rural areas. These changes indicate the emergence of the earliest state in China.

Early Seafarers of the Comoro Islands: the Dembeni Phase of the IXth-Xth Centuries AD

Although previous volumes of Azania have carried articles and notes on Madagascar and Mozambique as well as allusions to the Comoro Islands (as in Derek Nurses study of Swahili linguistic history in XVIII), this is the first article specifically on the Archipelago. Being concerned with the earliest recognised human settlements on the Comores, which show similarities to the earliest levels at Kilwa, Manda and Shanga on the African coast with their maritime connections with the Persian Gulf, the article is especially appropriate in Azania, even more so this year to coincide with the publication of the late Neville Chitticks Manda (BIEA Memoir 9). Those scholars who have recently been questioning received wisdom that Qanbalu was on Pemba and suggesting instead its location on the Comores may search for support in this article, but the author advises caution at this stage. Especially valuable is the food-crop evidence recovered. The indication of Setaria (‘foxtail millet’) is perhaps unexpected. Although it...

Stone tools and foraging in northern Madagascar challenge Holocene extinction models

Past research on Madagascar indicates that village communities were established about AD 500 by people of both Indonesian and East African heritage. Evidence of earlier visits is scattered and contentious. Recent archaeological excavations in northern Madagascar provide evidence of occupational sites with microlithic stone technologies related to foraging for forest and coastal resources. A forager occupation of one site dates to earlier than 2000 B.C., doubling the length of Madagascar’s known occupational history, and thus the time during which people exploited Madagascar’s environments. We detail stratigraphy, chronology, and artifacts from two rock shelters. Ambohiposa near Iharana (Vohémar) on the northeast coast, yielded a stratified assemblage with small flakes, microblades, and retouched crescentic and trapezoidal tools, probably projectile elements, made on cherts and obsidian, some brought more that 200 km. 14C dates are contemporary with the earliest villages. No food remains are preserved. Lakaton’i Anja near Antsiranana in the north yielded several stratified assemblages. The latest assemblage is well dated to A.D. 1050–1350, by 14C and optically stimulated luminescence dating and pottery imported from the Near East and China. Below is a series of stratified assemblages similar to Ambohiposa. 14C and optically stimulated luminescence dates indicate occupation from at least 2000 B.C. Faunal remains indicate a foraging pattern. Our evidence shows that foragers with a microlithic technology were active in Madagascar long before the arrival of farmers and herders and before many Late Holocene faunal extinctions. The differing effects of historically distinct economies must be identified and understood to reconstruct Holocene histories of human environmental impact.

Ancient crops provide first archaeological signature of the westward Austronesian expansion

Significance The prehistoric settlement of Madagascar by people from distant Southeast Asia has long captured both scholarly and public imagination, but on the ground evidence for this colonization has eluded archaeologists for decades. Our study provides the first, to our knowledge, archaeological evidence for an early Southeast Asian presence in Madagascar and reveals that this settlement extended to the Comoros. Our findings point to a complex Malagasy settlement history and open new research avenues for linguists, geneticists, and archaeologists to further study the timing and process of this population movement. They also provide insight into early processes of Indian Ocean biological exchange and in particular, Madagascar’s floral introductions, which account for one-tenth of its current vascular plant species diversity. The Austronesian settlement of the remote island of Madagascar remains one of the great puzzles of Indo-Pacific prehistory. Although linguistic, ethnographic, and genetic evidence points clearly to a colonization of Madagascar by Austronesian language-speaking people from Island Southeast Asia, decades of archaeological research have failed to locate evidence for a Southeast Asian signature in the island’s early material record. Here, we present new archaeobotanical data that show that Southeast Asian settlers brought Asian crops with them when they settled in Africa. These crops provide the first, to our knowledge, reliable archaeological window into the Southeast Asian colonization of Madagascar. They additionally suggest that initial Southeast Asian settlement in Africa was not limited to Madagascar, but also extended to the Comoros. Archaeobotanical data may support a model of indirect Austronesian colonization of Madagascar from the Comoros and/or elsewhere in eastern Africa.

The Anthropocene and the landscape of Confucius: A historical ecology of landscape changes in northern and eastern China during the middle to late Holocene

The Yellow River catchment of northern China was central to the rise of complex societies from the first Neolithic farmers through to early states and empires. These cultural developments brought with them rising populations and increasing intensity of land-use. This region provides an important record of landscape changes that mark the development of the Anthropocene in China. Geoarchaeological research in the middle reaches of the Yellow River catchment of Henan Province and eastward to the Si River drainage of Shandong Province illustrates human impact on vegetation and hydrological systems dating back at least until the middle Neolithic Yangshao Period in the mid-Holocene, ca. 7000 yr BP. This research provides geomorphological evidence that early human impact began in the Yangshao period with deforestation, soil erosion, and increased alluviation in the upper catchment of the Yiluo River. The increased alluviation allowed small-scale Neolithic farmers to intensify and supplement their production with rice paddy farming. Further east along the Si River of Shandong Province, Neolithic Dawenkou farmers were intensifying production by taking advantage of the already moist floodplains, but had little impact on the surrounding forests and hillslopes. At the beginning of the Zhou Period (ca. 1000 BCE), farmers along the Si River at Qufu began to intensify production by digging canals into the floodplain, and deforestation of the hillslopes led to the beginnings of widespread floods and silty floodplain buildup, culminating in the massive destructive floods of the later Han Period characterized by thick sand beds.

Reconstructing Asian faunal introductions to eastern Africa from multi-proxy biomolecular and archaeological datasets

Human-mediated biological exchange has had global social and ecological impacts. In sub-Saharan Africa, several domestic and commensal animals were introduced from Asia in the pre-modern period; however, the timing and nature of these introductions remain contentious. One model supports introduction to the eastern African coast after the mid-first millennium CE, while another posits introduction dating back to 3000 BCE. These distinct scenarios have implications for understanding the emergence of long-distance maritime connectivity, and the ecological and economic impacts of introduced species. Resolution of this longstanding debate requires new efforts, given the lack of well-dated fauna from high-precision excavations, and ambiguous osteomorphological identifications. We analysed faunal remains from 22 eastern African sites spanning a wide geographic and chronological range, and applied biomolecular techniques to confirm identifications of two Asian taxa: domestic chicken (Gallus gallus) and black rat (Rattus rattus). Our approach included ancient DNA (aDNA) analysis aided by BLAST-based bioinformatics, Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) collagen fingerprinting, and direct AMS (accelerator mass spectrometry) radiocarbon dating. Our results support a late, mid-first millennium CE introduction of these species. We discuss the implications of our findings for models of biological exchange, and emphasize the applicability of our approach to tropical areas with poor bone preservation.

Developing Complex Societies in Southeast Asia: Using Archaeological and Historical Evidence

A number of archaeologists are making significant advances in the historical archaeology of Southeast Asia. The papers presented in this issue, and the one that preceded it, provide new insights and exciting directions for future research.

Modeling Tributary Economies and Hierarchical Polities

Archaeological anthropologists increasingly face, in all our endeavors, the problem of expressing and evaluating our ideas about cultural phenomena, in which participants deal with many impacts from parallel and higher-order entities through the recursive—that is, self-redefining—mechanisms that culture allows. New formal models involving “cultural algorithms” (Reynolds, 1994) provide promising approaches to such problems. Kent Flannery’s magisterial study of early foragers at the cave of Guild Naquitz in the Valley of Oaxaca in Mexico (Flannery, 1986) serves as an inspiration to those seeking to advance theoretical formulations about complex productive and social arrangements.

Robert E. Dewar (1949–2013)

Robert (Bob) Earl Dewar, known for his research and writing on the ecology and early human inhabitants of Madagascar, died in his home in Middle Haddam, Connecticut, on 8 April 2013. Bob’s dissertation research on the Neolithic of Taiwan was supervised by K.C. Chang, the premier East Asian archaeologist of his time in North America. He completed his doctoral studies at Yale in 1977, developing broad interests in human impacts on tropical environments. When he married Alison Richard, already well known for her studies of Madagascar’s lemurs, it was understandable that Bob would pursue these interests on “the Great Red Island”. Bob and Alison were on Madagascar during the 1970s, working in the arid southwest, Alison transforming her study site at Beza-Mahafaly into the fundamental ecological study area it is today, and Bob revisiting sites where the remains of Madagascar’s extinct large mammals and birds had been found, assessing claims for human hunting of this ‘megafauna’. He returned in 1980 as part of a trans-disciplinary team with funding from the National Science Foundation of the United States to study localities with Holocene remains from the far south to the far north. Bob’s first papers on extinctions in Madagascar (Dewar 1984, 1986) were the result. His contributions to the issue of extinctions continue to set the agenda for research (Dewar 1997). Field studies, however, are only one aspect of Bob’s work. A few years later, he made a fundamental theoretical contribution to the estimation of human population in archaeology. It is evident that sites with a given material assemblage need not be contemporary. Clearly the number of such sites could not provide a direct measure of past human population. Bob proposed an ingenious solution in which the rates of site foundation and site abandonment were extracted from the data and used to model the number of simultaneously occupied settlements (Dewar 1991). This solution to the contemporaneity problem is not perfect (Dewar 1994a), but it is a significant step forward in our efforts to estimate past human population change. Bob then used his model to assess population change in both the Near East and Madagascar (Dewar 1994b, 2007). Bob’s writings with Alison about ecological processes are no less impressive (e.g. Richard and Dewar 2007). Bob’s broad view of ecology, cultural adaptation and Malagasy cultural change (Dewar and Wright 1993) led him to organise a variety of basic regional studies in