Matt Pawlowicz

The Austronesian settlement of the remote island of Madagascar remains one of the great puzzles of Indo-Pacific prehistory. Although linguistic, ethnographic, and genetic evidence points clearly to a colonization of Madagascar by Austronesian language-speaking people from Island Southeast Asia, decades of archaeological research have failed to locate evidence for a Southeast Asian signature in the island’s early material record. Here, we present new archaeobotanical data that show that Southeast Asian settlers brought Asian crops with them when they settled in Africa. These crops provide the first, to our knowledge, reliable archaeological window into the South- east Asian colonization of Madagascar. They additionally suggest that initial Southeast Asian settlement in Africa was not limited to Madagascar, but also extended to the Comoros. Archaeobotanical data may support a model of indirect Austronesian colonization of Madagascar from the Comoros and/or elsewhere in eastern Africa.

From its inception in 2014, the interdisciplin-ary Bantu Mobility Project has sought to refocus research on the Bantu Expansions away from the macro-scale towards a "writ small" approach within a well-defined region with well-understood episodes of language expansion, namely, the middle Kafue and middle Zambezi catchments of southern Zambia. This tighter focus enables the project to capture the human agency shaping movements of people, animals, material goods, and languages, and to consider the productive tension between mobility and rootedness as Bantu-speaking populations became settled in particular regions between the sixth and sixteenth centuries AD. From an archaeological standpoint, careful study of the spatial contexts of recovered artifacts-and of the various human activities that left them behind-captures different forms and scales of mobility that existed alongside the rootedness of mounded settlements occupied over generations. This paper shows how a better understanding of those spatial contexts, and the settlement patterns and land use they encode, is being achieved around Basanga, Zambia, by combining systematic archaeological survey with data derived from satellite imagery using analytical techniques available through GIS, such as spatial interpolation and linear regression modeling. Ultimately, the project will aim to integrate the insights of that geospatial analysis with other archaeological, linguistic, historical, and environmental datasets to capture the stories of the people whose ideas, practices, and forms of mobility and rootedness constituted the local experience of the Bantu Expansions. Résumé Depuis sa création en 2014, le Bantu Mobility Project, un projet interdisciplinaire sur l'histoire de la mobilité des bantous, a proposé de remplacer une approche à grande échelle vers une approche à petite échelle dans une région bien définie avec des épisodes d'expansion linguistique bien compris, les bassins ver-sants du Kafue moyen et du Zambezi moyen dans le sud de la Zambie. Cette focalisation permet au projet de capturer l'agence humaine influençant les mouvements des personnes, des animaux, des matériaux et des langues, et de prendre en compte la tension productive entre mobilité et enracinement au fur lorsque les populations de langue bantou se sont installées dans ces régions entre les 6 e et 16 e siècles. D'un point de vue archéologique, une étude du contexte spatial des artefacts récupérés (et des diverses activités humaines qui les ont laissés) capture différentes formes et échelles des mobilité qui existaient parallèlement à l'enracinement des établissements en ruines occupés au fil des généra-tions. Une meilleure compréhension de ces contextes spatiaux, ainsi que des modèles de peuplement et de Afr Archaeol Rev