Madagascar

Madagascar, situated in the western Indian Ocean, is the fourth-largest island in the world. About 400 kilometers from Africa, which lies to the west, the island is itself a small continent with diversity in all aspects of the environment: physical, climatic, and biological. Archaeology is the main discipline that can help to reconstruct the past in Madagascar. Apart from an Arab script of perhaps the fourteenth century, written sources are available only from the nineteenth century, and oral traditions go back no further than the fifteenth century.

A brief review of the philosophical approaches to understanding Madagascar’s past from an archaeological point of view is useful. Madagascar is about 1,580 kilometers north to south and 580 kilometers east to west and covers some 587,000 square kilometers. Human settlements, right from the beginning, seem to have adapted to its different physical environments. The arid southern and western part, the cool central highlands, and the humid eastern forests have developed societies with economies comprising, respectively, gathering and hunting, herding, irrigated rice cultivation or swidden (slash and burn) cultivation. Although Madagascar is not far from Africa, the language used throughout the island is of Southeast Asian origin, an Austronesian language close to the one spoken on Borneo. Nevertheless, some African vocabulary does exist, and this linguistic synthesis has defined the much-studied problem of the first human settlement of Madagascar, which has fascinated researchers, including archaeologists, for more than a century.

The origin and settlement of Madagascar have been key research problems since the beginning of the twentieth century. Based on evidence, settlement is believed to be less than 2,000 years old. Who were the first inhabitants and when did they arrive? Folktales record myths about first inhabitants and past environments. These myths, for example, refer to “the Lalomena,” “the red beast,” perhaps the pygmy hippopotamus, and “the Vorombe,” “the big bird,” perhaps the Aepyornis, both of which are indigenous to Madagascar.

Interest in the past is important for the Malagasy people themselves, and the Malagasy concept of the past and its periodization are consistent across the island. Six main periods, sometimes with subdivisions, characterize this concept of the past: faha-gola (“faha, in the Malagasy concept, states the period, and “gola” is used to point very old times, the unknown first settlement), faha-vazimba (the vazimba are said to have been the first inhabitants met on the island by new migrants around the fifteenth century), faha-gasy (the period when the ancestors of actual inhabitants settled on the island), faha-mpanjaka (the period when the kings reigned), faha-vazaha or faha-zanatany (the period of colonization), and faha-leovantena (the period of independence). This periodization also comes down from oral traditions.

Linguistic and historic studies provide some chronological points of reference that are useful in understanding the settlement of Madagascar. The seventh to the tenth centuries a.d. marked the coming of migrants from Southeast Asia via Africa. In the eleventh century, Shirazi migrants reached the Comoros and the northern part of Madagascar, and in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Islamized groups, the Zafiraminia, arrived in the southeastern part of the country. The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries saw the arrival of two other Islamized groups, the Zafikazimambo and the Anakara, in the same region. About 1500, the supremacy of the Arab traders in the Indian Ocean declined and the Europeans arrived.

The past has always fascinated all Malagasy people, and each family has traditions about its own history. Among the better known nineteenth-century scholars who began to record the history of Madagascar was Raombana, secretary to Queen Ranavalona I (1828–1857). When very young, Raombana and his twin brother Rahaniraka had been sent to England by King Radama I to be educated, and they stayed there for ten years. Because Raombana was descended from a former king and princes in the highlands and because of his English education, he developed an interest in the past of his country. He visited and described house foundations and other archaeological features at Ifanongoavana,