Surviving in place: Environmental archeology in Madagascar

The Texas-sized island where she spent a part of her childhood sits in the Indian Ocean 300 miles east of southern Africa, and is known for its amazing biodiversity. Until about a thousand years ago, its fauna included large-bodied animals long since extinct in most of the world: pygmy hippos, giant tortoises and elephant birds among them. Previous scientists had theorized that humans contributed to this relatively recent wave of disappearances. If so, Douglass, wanted to know how. By overhunting? By modifying habitat? By introducing domesticated animals — sheep, goats, cattle, and dogs — that out-competed native species?

“I was just looking for archeological sites that could help me answer that question,” remembers Douglass, now an assistant professor of anthropology and African studies at Penn State. “But then, as I became more embedded in the work, I’ve been driven to connect the knowledge that people hold today with the archeological record.”

The attempt to bridge past and present came naturally to her. “I always saw my role as something that had to be relevant to people who are living today,” she explains. “The production of archeological knowledge just as an esoteric thing is not compelling to me.”

In large part, she says, her perspective is a result of her upbringing. Born in Togo, West Africa, she was adopted along with three siblings by parents who were international aid workers and also worked in public health. While she was growing up, the family lived at various times in Madagascar and several other African countries, as well as in Ukraine. “So I experienced a lot of different cultural contexts, and also saw a lot of need — and the importance of development work to tackle pressing challenges.”

That experience made a lasting impact. “Archeology to me,” she says, “has always been a way of reconciling, on the one hand, deeper histories that I struggled as a child to piece together because we have this unique family and background, and on the other hand, posing questions of the past that can in some way inform how we tackle the problems of today.”

Carving a niche in Velondriake

Douglass arrived at University Park in 2017, a co-funded faculty member in both Liberal Arts and the Institutes of Energy and the Environment. In 2020, she was named the Joyce and Doug Sherwin Early Career Professor in the Rock Ethics Institute. Her titles reflect what she says is “a genuine commitment to interdisciplinarity, and to supporting younger faculty,” that she has found at Penn State.

As an environmental archeologist working in southwest Madagascar, her work is indeed interdisciplinary. Douglass seeks to understand the dynamics of this remarkable place — how humans have managed to carve out a niche here in order to survive in a constantly changing climate. And how, over two thousand years,  the impacts of human adaptation have in turn altered the landscape.

The Velondriake Marine Protected Area, including a network of fishing villages along the island’s southwest coast, is home to diverse communities of fishers, herders, foragers, and farmers descended from 13 ancestral clans, who continue to make their living from a landscape that includes coral reefs, estuaries, dry forest, and grasslands, among many other local ecologies.  

Understanding the complex dynamics requires an integrated approach. In addition to archeological surveys and excavations, the Morombe Archeological Project (MAP), which Douglass started in 2012, relies on ecological and geospatial methods, including remote sensing combined with predictive modeling. A recent study published by Dylan Davis, one of her graduate students, demonstrated how remote sensing combined with predictive modeling can be used to quantify changes in land use over time.

The MAP also incorporates oral history. For a two-year project led by Douglass and postdoctoral fellow Tanambelo Rasolondrainy that ended in 2018, team members interviewed over 100 local elders in 32 communities within Velondriake. In a related oral history project in the Mikea forest the team also used live drone footage played through virtual reality headsets to help jog participants’ memories related to specific archeological sites.  

Among other things, the oral history project captures generations of local knowledge about how these communities have managed to adapt to environmental challenges; the researchers were looking for patterns of mobility and settlement, cooperation and resource use in response to drought or scarcity or other variable conditions. Understanding these responses, Douglass says, in turn informs the team’s exploration of Velondriake’s deeper past.

She is working to reconstruct that past using archeological materials — shared artifacts and technologies, trade items, as well as animal and plant remains — as proxies for the social connections between ancient communities. Douglass employs both standard methods, like measuring carbon and nitrogen istopes in cattle bones to infer past diet and response to drought, and more innovative techniques. For a recent study she devised a method using microstructural variations in fossil eggshell to help determine whether Pleistocene-era hunter-gatherers may have already been experimenting with avian husbandry.

Comparing the archeological evidence she is amassing against the existing paleoclimate record, Douglass then looks for correlations between climate change and human response across the span of the region’s ecological history. Ultimately, she says, “What you end up with is a localized understanding of what it means to be resilient, to weather a storm.”

Equal partners in co-produced science

At least as important to Douglass as this integrated approach is a commitment to working collaboratively—not just with other scholars but also with members of the local community. A cover story in the journal Nature in 2018 recognized her as a leader in what has come to be called community-based participatory research, or co-produced science.

For Douglass the concept links back to the idea of relevance, her belief that the people and communities she studies should share in the benefit of that research. In this case, sharing means active participation: The MAP team in Madagascar is made up mostly of Vezo fishers. Although many team members have a limited school-based education, she regards them as equal partners in the production of scientific knowledge.

 “To me there’s nothing more precious than place-based knowledge,” Douglass explains. “These are people who have lived in and derived their livelihood from this area, and have multi-generations worth of knowledge of all these ecological and geological and climate processes that I am interested in.” 

Nor does she dismiss their expertise as “other ways of knowing,” something outside the bounds of academic science. “All humans engage in empirical observation, asking questions and posing hypotheses,” she says. “I consider everyone that I work with in Madagascar to be a scientist.”

Thinking inclusively comes easily to her because of her own early experience of feeling like an outsider in science. “There weren’t a lot of role models, people who looked like me,” she says, reflecting on her educational path. “In tandem with that, I love to learn in a very hands-on way. I always felt that bringing people with all kinds of backgrounds to the table was them helping me to learn all these things that I needed to know.”

In return, Douglass takes seriously her responsibility to the community she has become a part of. When a wave of COVID infections hit Velondriake in April 2021, she and the MAP team dove in to help, raising money from afar for personal protective equipment and coordinating with team members on the ground to distribute to local villages. “As anthropologists in particular, I think we’re often working with communities that are vulnerable, that will become more vulnerable as climate change intensifies,” she says. “There’s an obligation to contribute.”

Though she acknowledges some resistance among her colleagues to the idea that researchers thus embedded within their communities can produce rigorous science, she believes the opposite is true. As she told a reporter for Nature in the wake of the COVID effort, “Having strong community relationships — especially when they are transparent, mutualistic and reciprocal — improves the quality of the science you do, and they make you ethically more responsible for the outcomes.”

A fuller picture of Madagascar's history

The dominant archeological narrative regarding Madagascar links the arrival of humans with an immediate wave of extinctions, effectively blaming the ancient Malagasy people for wiping out whole sectors of the island’s fauna. After years of study, however, Douglass argues that this narrative is overly simplistic, based on insufficient evidence. Furthermore, she says, it has negatively impacted present-day conservation and development efforts in the country, which, she writes, “are often guided by relatively short-term perspectives on how the region’s landscapes and ecologies have co-evolved with human communities.”

To help remedy this situation, the MAP team wants to provide a fuller picture of Velondriake’s ecological history. Ten years into the work, that picture is beginning to emerge.

In 2018, for example, the team published the first comprehensive study of animal fossils collected from archeological sites in the area. Results of both morphological and DNA analysis present a more nuanced view of ancient fishing practices, and suggest that ancient communities selectively exploited marine resources. In addition, comparison with current practices revealed that the intensive fishing of sharks, acknowledged today as a serious environmental issue, is a recent phenomenon tied to increased demand for shark in international markets. Nor did they find any evidence for wholesale slaughter of megafauna.

A more recent study, involving examination of radiocarbon data, suggests that humans may have been present on Madagascar much earlier than previously thought, and therefore may have co-existed with now-extinct species for a thousand years or more before the populations of those animals began to crash. 

Not surprisingly, Douglass says, the inclusion of place-based knowledge often up-ends assumptions imposed by outsiders. “We tend to have an idea of what constitutes disturbance, climate stress, events that could lead to community disintegration, but what we’re learning is that some of the things that we recognize as highly stressful may be things that the local niche, the local system, had adapted to dealing with,” she says.

Similarly, she says, while theories about migration patterns within Madagascar posit that communities have tended to move when pushed to do so by a scarcity of resources, the local historians the team has interviewed often speak instead in terms of being pulled to pursue new opportunities. “We need that place-based knowledge to understand how over time people have coped.”

The challenge ahead: Intensifying climate change

Douglass frequently cites a proverb of the Vezo, fisher people of southwest Madagascar: Translated into English, it means, “The land that sustains you is the land of the ancestors.”

These connections, the ties not only between people and the land but between generations of inhabitants, are the key to survival in such a challenging environment, she says. And social memory is the glue that holds it all together.

Social memory, Douglass explains, is the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next. Its central importance to the creation of a sustainable human niche in Madagascar became increasingly clear as Douglass and Tanambelo Rasolondrainy analyzed the oral history data the MAP team has collected.

“Mobility, use of resources, the creation and maintenance of social ties among communities… all of these are mediated by social memory,” Douglass and Rasolandrainy say. “People’s ability to recount and transmit the stories of their individual and family ties to particular places, people, and livelihoods are key adaptive mechanisms.”

In Madagascar, much of this transmission has been accomplished via a tradition of storytelling known as tapasiry, sometimes translated as “tales of proper conduct.” Through tapasiry, groups of migrating fishers, herders, foragers and farmers acknowledge connections and past cooperation, share strategies, and negotiate access to resources, Douglass says. When a group arrives in a new community, “the first thing that happens is people gather and start exchanging stories.” 

Unfortunately, Douglass says, and due to a number of factors, this tradition is starting to break down. “The local storytelling traditions are disappearing. Children are not being exposed to tapasiry,” she says. The fraying of social memory is exacerbated by rapid changes linked to globalization and the emergence of a market economy, including, for the first time, industrial-level resource extraction—mining, forestry, and fishing on a scale that dwarfs subsistence-level activities. An added pressure, she says, is the in-migration of displaced populations from other communities. And all of this is amplified by the impacts of intensifying climate change that have Madagascar, according to the United Nations, on the brink of experiencing “the world's first climate change famine."

How will the communities she studies adapt to deal with these changes? What are the strategies that have sustained them in the past? Will those strategies be enough to sustain them now? These are some of the questions that Douglass hopes to answer in the next phase of the Molombe Archeological Project.

A prestigious Carnegie fellowship will allow her to expand the oral history work, in tandem with a coral coring project to reconstruct the paleoclimate record, looking for clues to how local fishing communities have dealt with climate change in the ancient past. What the team is learning, Douglass believes, “can help us ultimately understand and better deal with the challenges ahead.”

To her, that’s an critical part of MAP’s role as a member of the Velondriake community. But the answers she seeks echo far beyond southwest Madagascar. Douglass is part of a pending proposal that would extend the study to subsistence communities around the world facing similar challenges — in Puerto Rico, Ethiopia, Fiji, and the Arctic. “These communities may look different from one another,” she says, “but they are completely interconnected.”

Her core idea is to try to understand how and when successful adaptive behaviors emerge in these embattled communities, and also how they spread. Ultimately, she concludes, those lessons will be valuable for the rest of us.

“There’s a lot we can learn from the witness testimony of communities on the front lines.”

This story first appeared in the Fall 2021 issue of Research|Penn State magazine.