Ancient crops provide first archaeological signature of the westward Austronesian expansion

2016/05/31 by Alison Crowther, Leilani Lucas, Richard Helm +10 · 12 citations
Social Sciences · #Global Maritime and Colonial Histories #Island Studies and Pacific Affairs #Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies

paper · pdf · doi:10.1073/pnas.1522714113

openalex publication_date 2016/05/31 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01

Abstract

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.

Citations

• Pastoralists, Warriors and Colonists: The Archaeology of Southern Madagascar
• A chronology for late prehistoric Madagascar
• Ceramics and the Early Swahili: Deconstructing the Early Tana Tradition
• IntCal13 and Marine13 Radiocarbon Age Calibration Curves 0–50,000 Years cal BP
• Bayesian Analysis of Radiocarbon Dates

Cited by

• The Comoros Show the Earliest Austronesian Gene Flow into the Swahili Corridor
• A multimillennial climatic context for the megafaunal extinctions in Madagascar and Mascarene Islands
• Rain Forest Fragmentation and Environmental Dynamics on Nosy Be Island (NW Madagascar) at 1300 cal BP Is Attributable to Intensified Human Impact
• Extraordinary human energy consumption and resultant geological impacts beginning around 1950 CE initiated the proposed Anthropocene Epoch
• A new interpretation of Madagascar's megafaunal decline: The “Subsistence Shift Hypothesis”
• Cutmarked bone of drought-tolerant extinct megafauna deposited with traces of fire, human foraging, and introduced animals in SW Madagascar
• Settling Madagascar: When Did People First Colonize the World’s Largest Island?
• Genomic landscape of human diversity across Madagascar
• Strong selection during the last millennium for African ancestry in the admixed population of Madagascar
• The Rise and Fall of African Rice Cultivation Revealed by Analysis of 246 New Genomes
• Comoros [wikipedia]
• History of the Comoros [wikipedia]