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In this paper, we advocate a collaborative approach to investigating past human–environment interactions in southwest Madagascar. We do so by critically reflecting as a team on the development of the Morombe Archaeological Project, initiated in 2011 as a collaboration between an American archaeologist and the Vezo communities of the Velondriake Marine Protected Area. Our objectives are to assess our trajectory in building collaborative partnerships with diverse local, indigenous, and descendent communities and to provide concrete suggestions for the development of new collaborative projects in environmental archaeology. Through our Madagascar case study, we argue that contemporary environmental and economic challenges create an urgency to articulate and practice an inclusive environmental archaeology, and we propose that environmental archaeologists must make particular efforts to include local, indigenous, and descendent communities. Finally, we assert that full collaboration involves equal power sharing and mutual knowledge exchange and suggest an approach for critical self-evaluation of collaborative projects.

The impact of resource exploitation by ancient human communities on Madagascar's environment is an area of intense debate. A fundamental question in the archaeology of Madagascar is the extent to which arrival of settlers, introduction of non-native plants and animals, and subsequent human exploitation of island biota, which catalyzed declines in biodiversity and significantly degraded environmental conditions. Fine-grained datasets, including zooarchaeological, archaeobotanical and other ecological evidence, are needed to assess the relationship between human resource exploitation and environmental change. On Madagascar, the resolution of zooarchaeological datasets is often reduced by poor preservation of faunal remains, making precise taxonomic identifications difficult, and few projects to-date have comprehensively assessed zooarchaeological data. Here, we present zooarchaeological data from three coastal villages in the Velondriake Marine Protected Area in southwest Madagascar, where human occupation spans from ca. 1400 BP to the present. Faunal remains from the Late Holocene sites of Antsaragnagnangy and Antsaragnasoa were identified using morphological analysis of remains, and a PCR-based bulk bone metabarcoding approach was applied at Andamotibe to molecularly identify fish and other vertebrates in a faunal assemblage that was particularly fragmented. Results were interpreted and contextualized using modern data on local fish diversity, climate and anthropogenic impacts on marine and estuarine habitats, as well as modern fishing practices (including preferred fishing grounds, tackle, taxonomic representation and volume of catch). Our use of multiple analytical and interpretative approaches has provided the most highly resolved view to date of past human subsistence in coastal southwest Madagascar. We contend that future research into human-environment dynamics on Madagascar should make use of diverse analytical methods, in order to more comprehensively evaluate past interactions between human communities and the native biota. Furthermore, we encourage an historical ecological approach, so that long-term perspectives on changing human-environment dynamics may be used to contextualize modern trends.

The antiquity and nature of coastal resource procurement is central to understanding human evolution and adaptations to complex environments. It has become increasingly apparent in global archaeological studies that the timing, characteristics, and trajectories of coastal resource use are highly variable. Within Africa, discussions of these issues have largely been based on the archaeological record from the south and northeast of the continent, with little evidence from eastern coastal areas leaving significant spatial and temporal gaps in our knowledge. Here, we present data from Panga ya Saidi, a limestone cave complex located 15 km from the modern Kenyan coast, which represents the first long-term sequence of coastal engagement from eastern Africa. Rather than attempting to distinguish between coastal resource use and coastal adaptations, we focus on coastal engagement as a means of characterising human relationships with marine environments and resources from this inland location. We use aquatic mollusc data spanning the past 67,000 years to document shifts in the acquisition, transportation, and discard of these materials, to better understand long-term trends in coastal engagement. Our results show pulses of coastal engagement beginning with low-intensity symbolism, and culminating in the consistent low-level transport of marine and freshwater food resources, emphasising a diverse relationship through time. Panga ya Saidi has the oldest stratified evidence of marine engagement in eastern Africa, and is the only site in Africa which documents coastal resources from the Late Pleistocene through the Holocene, highlighting the potential archaeological importance of peri-coastal sites to debates about marine resource relationships. Introduction Site location and description Materials and methods Results - PYS mollusc assemblage characteristics - Comparative trends in mollusc discard Discussion Conclusion

Identifying the species that are at risk of local extinction in highly diverse ecosystems is a big challenge for conservation science. Assessments of species status are costly and difficult to implement in developing countries with diverse ecosystems due to a lack of species-specific surveys, species-specific data, and other resources. Numerous techniques are devised to determine the threat status of species based on the availability of data and budgetary limits. On this basis, we developed a framework that compared occurrence data of historically exploited reef species in Kenya from existing disparate data sources. Occurrence data from archaeological remains (750-1500CE) was compared with occurrence data of these species catch assessments, and underwater surveys (1991-2014CE). This comparison indicated that only 67 species were exploited over a 750 year period, 750-1500CE, whereas 185 species were landed between 1995 and 2014CE. The first step of our framework identified 23 reef species as threatened with local extinction. The second step of the framework further evaluated the possibility of local extinction with Bayesian extinction analyses using occurrence data from naturalists' species list with the existing occurrence data sources. The Bayesian extinction analysis reduced the number of reef species threatened with local extinction from 23 to 15. We compared our findings with three methods used for assessing extinction risk. Commonly used extinction risk methods varied in their ability to identify reef species that we identified as threatened with local extinction by our comparative and Bayesian method. For example, 12 of the 15 threatened species that we identified using our framework were listed as either least concern, unevaluated, or data deficient in the International Union for the Conservation of Nature red list. Piscivores and macro-invertivores were the only functional groups found to be locally extinct. Comparing occurrence data from disparate sources revealed a large number of historically exploited reef species that are possibly locally extinct. Our framework addressed biases such as uncertainty in priors, sightings and survey effort, when estimating the probability of local extinction. Our inexpensive method showed the value and potential for disparate data to fill knowledge gaps that exist in species extinction assessments.

Most of our current knowledge of late Pleistocene African bone technology is drawn from southern African sites, with recent discoveries indicating that bone- and stone-tipped arrows (propelled by a bow) were in use prior to 60,000 years BP. Integration of archaeological with ethnographic data similarly suggests that hunting with poison-tipped arrows on the African continent has an antiquity of at least 24,000 years. Unfortunately, similar analysis of material from eastern Africa is largely absent and consequently, with the sole exception of barbed points, we know very little regarding osseous technology in this region and how similar or dissimilar it is to contexts located further south. This paper presents a small assemblage of seven bone artefacts recovered from the late Pleistocene deposits of Kuumbi Cave, Zanzibar. Comparison of the bone projectile points, a bone awl and a notched bone tube with ethnographic and archaeological material from throughout the Sub-Saharan region suggests that, as e...

The late Pleistocene and Holocene history of eastern Africa is complex and major gaps remain in our understanding of human occupation during this period. Questions concerning the identities, geographical distributions and chronologies of foraging, herding and agricultural populations — often problematically equated with the chronological labels ‘Later Stone Age (LSA)’, ‘Neolithic’ and ‘Iron Age’ — are still unresolved. Previous studies at the site of Kuumbi Cave in the Zanzibar Archipelago of Tanzania reported late Pleistocene Middle Stone Age (MSA) and LSA, mid-Holocene Neolithic and late Holocene Iron Age occupations (Sinclair et al. 2006 Sinclair, P.J.J., Juma, A., and Chami, F.A. 2006. “Excavations at Kuumbi Cave on Zanzibar in 2005.” In The African Archaeology Network: Research in Progress, edited by J. Kinahan and J.H.A. Kinahan, 95–106. Dar es Salaam: Dar es Salaam University Press.[Google Scholar]; Chami 2009 Chami, F.A. 2009. Zanzibar and the Swahili Coast from c.30,000 Years Ago. Dar es Salaam: E&D; Vision Publishing.[Google Scholar]). Kuumbi Cave considerably extends the chronology of human occupation on the eastern African coast and findings from the site have been the basis for the somewhat contentious identification of both a coastal Neolithic culture and early chicken, a domesticate that was introduced to Africa from Asia. The site therefore warrants further investigation. Here we report on a new excavation of the Kuumbi Cave sequence that has produced a suite of 20 radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dates. Our results suggest that the cave’s stratigraphy is complex, reflecting taphonomic processes that present interpretive and dating challenges. Our assessment of the stratigraphic sequence demonstrates three phases of habitation, two of which reflect terminal Pleistocene occupation and are characterised by quartz microliths, bone points and the exploitation of terrestrial and marine species, and one of which reflects later reoccupation by AD 600. In this latter phase, Kuumbi Cave was inhabited by a population with a locally distinct material culture that included idiosyncratic Tana or Triangular Incised Ware ceramics and medium-sized limestone stone tools, but with a subsistence economy similar to that of the late Pleistocene, albeit with more emphasis on marine foods and smaller terrestrial mammals. Our results suggest that Kuumbi Cave may have been unoccupied for much of the Holocene, after Zanzibar became an island. Our findings also place into question earlier identifications of domesticates, Asian fauna and a mid-Holocene Neolithic culture at the site.

The human communities and ecosystems of island and coastal southeast Africa face significant and linked ecological threats. Socioecological conditions of concern to communities, governments, nongovernmental organizations, and researchers include declining agricultural productivity, deforestation, introductions of non-native flora and fauna, coastal erosion and sedimentation, damage to marine environments, illegal fishing, overfishing, waste pollution, salinization of freshwater supplies, and rising energy demands, among others. Human-environment challenges are connected to longer, often ignored, histories of social and ecological dynamics in the region. We argue that these challenges are more effectively understood and addressed within a longer-term historical ecology framework. We reviewed cases from Madagascar, coastal Kenya, and the Zanzibar Archipelago of fisheries, deforestation, and management of human waste to encourage increased engagement among historical ecologists, conservation scientists, and policy makers. These case studies demonstrate that by widening the types and time depths of data sets we used to investigate and address current socioecological challenges, our interpretations of their causes and strategies for their mitigation varied significantly.Perspectivas Históricas sobre las Dinámicas Contemporáneas entre Humanos y el Ambiente en el Sureste de África Resumen Las comunidades humanas y los ecosistemas de las costas del sureste africano enfrentan amenazas ecológicas significativas y vinculadas. Las condiciones socio-ecológicas que preocupan a las comunidades, los gobiernos, las organizaciones no gubernamentales y a los investigadores incluyen la poductividad agrícola en declinación, la deforestación, la introducción de flora y fauna no nativa, la sedimentación y erosión costera, el daño hacia los ecosistemas marinos, la pesca ilegal, la sobrepesca, la contaminación por desechos, la salinización de las cuencas de agua dulce, y la creciente demanda de energía, entre otras. Los retos humanos - ecosistema están conectados con historias más largas, y frecuentemente ignoradas, de dinámicas sociales y ecológicas en la región. Argumentamos que estos retos se entienden y se tratan con mayor efectividad dentro de un marco de trabajo de ecología histórica con un periodo más largo. Revisamos casos de pesquerías, deforestación y manejo de desechos humanos en Madagascar, la costa de Kenia y el archipiélago de Zanzíbar para propiciar una mayor participación entre los ecologistas históricos, los científicos de la conservación, y los legisladores. Estos estudios de caso demuestran que al ampliar los tipos y la temporalidad de los conjuntos de datos que usamos para investigar y tratar los retos socio-ecológicos contemporáneos, nuestras interpretaciones de las causas de estos retos y las estrategias para su mitigación variaron significativamente.

The cat has long been important to human societies as a pest-control agent, object of symbolic value and companion animal, but little is known about its domestication process and early anthropogenic dispersal. Here we show, using ancient DNA analysis of geographically and temporally widespread archaeological cat remains, that both the Near Eastern and Egyptian populations of Felis silvestris lybica contributed to the gene pool of the domestic cat at different historical times. While the cat's worldwide conquest began during the Neolithic period in the Near East, its dispersal gained momentum during the Classical period, when the Egyptian cat successfully spread throughout the Old World. The expansion patterns and ranges suggest dispersal along human maritime and terrestrial routes of trade and connectivity. A coat-colour variant was found at high frequency only after the Middle Ages, suggesting that directed breeding of cats occurred later than with most other domesticated animals.

Recent archaeological research has firmly established eastern Africa's offshore islands as important localities for understanding the region's pre-Swahili maritime adaptations and early Indian Ocean trade connections. While the importance of the sea and small offshore islands to the development of urbanized and mercantile Swahili societies has long been recognized, the formative stages of island colonization—and in particular the processes by which migrating Iron Age groups essentially became “maritime”—are still relatively poorly understood. Here we present the results of recent archaeological fieldwork in the Mafia Archipelago, which aims to understand these early adaptations and situate them within a longer-term trajectory of island settlement and pre-Swahili cultural developments. We focus on the results of zooarchaeological, archaeobotanical, and material culture studies relating to early subsistence and trade on this island to explore the changing significance of marine resources to the local economy. We also discuss the implications of these maritime adaptations for the development of local and long-distance Indian Ocean trade networks.

This paper presents the results of a consensus-driven process identifying 50 priority research questions for historical ecology obtained through crowdsourcing, literature reviews, and in-person workshopping. A deliberative approach was designed to maximize discussion and debate with defined outcomes. Two in-person workshops (in Sweden and Canada) over the course of two years and online discussions were peer facilitated to define specific key questions for historical ecology from anthropological and archaeological perspectives. The aim of this research is to showcase the variety of questions that reflect the broad scope for historical-ecological research trajectories across scientific disciplines. Historical ecology encompasses research concerned with decadal, centennial, and millennial human-environmental interactions, and the consequences that those relationships have in the formation of contemporary landscapes. Six interrelated themes arose from our consensus-building workshop model: (1) climate and environmental change and variability; (2) multi-scalar, multi-disciplinary; (3) biodiversity and community ecology; (4) resource and environmental management and governance; (5) methods and applications; and (6) communication and policy. The 50 questions represented by these themes highlight meaningful trends in historical ecology that distill the field down to three explicit findings. First, historical ecology is fundamentally an applied research program. Second, this program seeks to understand long-term human-environment interactions with a focus on avoiding, mitigating, and reversing adverse ecological effects. Third, historical ecology is part of convergent trends toward transdisciplinary research science, which erodes scientific boundaries between the cultural and natural.

Historical and archaeological records of consumption practices indicate that people living along the Swahili coast relied largely on fish for subsistence; however, little research has been done to explore how aquatic subsistence strategies varied among different settlements in the region, both spatially and chronologically. Such questions are particularly interesting, as the communities were largely urban, and relied on fish for the bulk of their protein consumption. We compared evidence of subsistence strategies and exploited fish habitats in two Swahili regions that represent different maritime landscapes. Because particular fish species generally inhabit different sections of the marine environment, the composition of these species at each site can be used to estimate the variable exploitation of these habitats. Overall, the analysed samples showed a heavy exploitation of fish found around coral reefs, but with varying proportions of other exploited habitats, such as estuary, mangrove, sandy/muddy, and outer reef zones. The general pattern indicates that samples from offshore islands have higher representations of fish from coral/rocky habitats while samples from near-shore islands show a lower reliance on coral species. Over time there is an increase at certain sites in the exploitation of oceanic and pelagic fish that coincides with the more frequent consumption of domesticated bovids. We discuss the historical and environmental implications of these variable patterns of aquatic subsistence strategies along the East African coastline, and propose that there is a close link between their ability to exploit these marine resources, their success as urban settlements, and the development of feasting rituals.

Small-scale excavations were recently undertaken at the site of Ukunju Cave in the Mafia Archipelago, Tanzania, to collect new bioarchaeological and material culture data relating to the site's occupation and the nature of early subsistence and long-distance trade in the region. Our findings suggest that occupation of the cave began during the Middle Iron Age (MIA, seventh to tenth centuries AD), as indicated by the presence of local Early Tana Tradition (ETT)/Triangular Incised Ware (TIW) pottery in the lowest layers above bedrock, as well as small quantities of imported ceramics and glass beads also dating from the mid- to the late first millennium AD. Small assemblages of faunal and botanical remains, including introduced African crops (pearl millet, sorghum, baobab and possibly cowpea) were found in association with these finds, indicating that these MIA communities practised a mixed economy of fishing, domestic livestock keeping and agriculture. In addition, the presence of cotton suggests they may h...