The Matitanana archaeological project: Culture history and social complexity in the Seven Rivers Region of southeastern Madagascar

My field research for this dissertation consisted of four seasons of archaeological survey and excavation along the Matitanana and neighboring rivers on Madagascar's southeastern coast. The Antemoro people who live in the area today have long recorded their history and oral traditions with a derived Arabic script in written texts known as sorabe. These various sources of information about the past are combined in this dissertation to produce a picture of the sequence of human settlement in this area over the past thousand years. A new ceramic chronology was created through an analysis of the excavated remains to help structure the survey results. Additional surveys outside the main research area also helped to locate the quarry sources for the chlorite-schist (or steatite) stone vessels imported as early trade goods into the Matitanana area. The 240 archaeological sites documented in the site catalogue reveal an initially sparse coastal occupation that eventually spread upriver. This sequence was interrupted in the 15th century by the abandonment of the banks of the lower river valley, creating two potentially-competing population centers, with the first large towns appearing on the coast just north of the Matitanana River mouth separated from a group of evenly-spaced smaller sites 20 kilometers inland. This pattern is linked with the arrival of the ancestors of the Antemoro, who do not claim to have been the first inhabitants of this region. Archaeologically, this phase was followed by one in which people reoccupied the entire landscape and created ditched hilltop sites in defensive locations, corresponding to the period of the first European incursions into the area. One consideration in this work is the archaeological visibility of those social processes that help create the inequalities inherent in state formation. It is argued that the archaeology of this Indian Ocean island relates to that of the East African coast in this regard.