noted in oral traditions as the first settlement of migrants from the eastern coast to the highlands. These migrants were said to be the ancestors of the kings of the central highlands who tried to unify Madagascar in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Raombana’s observations were useful in guiding the recent excavations of David Rasamuel at Ifanongoavana (Rasamuel 1984).

European voyagers who went to Madagascar before the nineteenth century described ancient settlements. One of those voyagers, Flacourt, spent twenty years on the far southeastern coast and wrote a book about the region in the seventeenth century. Flacourt noted the site of Antranovato, literally “the house of stone,” which was probably erected by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. In the eighteenth century, Nicholas Mayeur noted the fourteenth- or fifteenth-century site of Vohemar in the northeastern part of the island and another, which he did not name, in the northwestern part, which he thought were connected to Vohemar. Many other people contributed to the historical and archaeological studies of Madagascar during the late nineteenth century. The most prolific and significant was Alfred Grandidier, who insisted that the Malagasy ancestors came largely from Southeast Asia and denied any significant African influence, in opposition to Gabriel Ferrand. In addition to his studies of history, ethnography, and environment, Grandidier also excavated the remains of extinct subfossils. Bones taken to the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris had traces of cutting by iron tools on them, and they have recently been confirmed and dated by accelerator techniques to the first century a.d.

Despite occasional mentions of stone tools, there is no evidence of Paleolithic flake stone industries like those in the nearby Africa. The oldest site dated by radiocarbon (728–764 a.d.) is a rock shelter in the far north of the island, the lowest level of which contains traces of human occupation. New methods of research, specifically paleoecological studies of lake sediments, indicate that the first extensive human impact on vegetation is found in sediments dated about 1,500–2,000 years ago.

There has been an evolution in the archaeological assessment of Madagascar’s history. The French, during the colonial period, excavated the sites of early ports, the most significant being Vohemar on the northeastern coast, which was excavated by Elie Vernier and Gaudebout in the 1940s. The results of this excavation were used to justify contemporary French occupation because they indicated that Madagascar had been colonized before. The inhabitants’ intellectual development was evident: their material culture was rich, and in their tombs, jewels and finely worked vessels of chlorite schist were found. Colonial administrators who wrote descriptions of the regions where they stayed proposed that the island’s initial settlement was recent, but as a result of oral traditions, these assertions would be corrected by the results of later research.

The first to initiate truly scientific archaeological research in Madagascar was a Frenchman, Pierre Verin, who went to Madagascar in the 1950s as a trainee in the colonial administration. Fascinated by the country and its inhabitants, he began to learn the language and to understand the Malagasy, an experience that greatly influenced his attitude toward Madagascar. Moreover, his anthropological and archaeological education at Yale University had provided him with theoretical and methodological insights, and his subsequent research in Polynesia had motivated him to study Madagascar because of its connection to Austronesian voyagers who had settled in both regions in the past. Returning to the island in the early 1960s, Verin began and developed archaeological research at the University of Madagascar (now University of Antananarivo), and geographers helped him locate and study unknown and earlier sites on the island. In the first edition of the journal Taloha (literally, “before nowadays”), the results of research on the first human settlement of Talaky on the far southern coast, dated by radiocarbon to the eleventh century a.d., were published, and Verin began a survey to trace the human settlement of the island. In the 1970s, he studied Islamic sites along the northern coast, which he termed “echelles.” One of these sites, Mahilaka, was reported in his doctoral thesis