Understanding where we’ve been and where we’re going

Globalization and sustainability may seem like terminology affixed to modern times, yet University of Queensland archaeologist Dr Alison Crowther says we’d be surprised how much they relate to the past.

Dr Crowther is in the midst of research that addresses historical riddles more than 1000 years old. Her latest findings on the movement of people, plants, animals, goods and customs across the Indian Ocean, have been ground-breaking.

“In its broadest context, this research provides unprecedented insight into the long-term history of human connectivity, and how that helped shape both the social and natural landscapes across this vast region,” Dr Crowther said.

“Globalization is not a modern phenomenon. Indeed, we can trace connectivity back thousands of years. It’s exciting…being able to connect our present to our past.”

Dr Crowther’s area of fascination for most of the past decade has been in East Africa, specifically around the island nations of Madagascar and the Comoros.

Linguists have long established that inhabitants of Madagascar, rather than speaking an African dialect, speak an Austronesian language most similar to those in Borneo, South-East Asia’s largest island.

The islands east of Africa also have a preference for rice that stretches back 1000 years, while the mainland African nations have traditionally preferenced foodstuffs such as millet and sorghum.

How did islands separated from Africa by a few hundred kilometers adopt hallmarks of a region more than 5000 kilometers away?

“If you looked at images of the terraced rice paddies of Madagascar you would swear they had been copied from the other side of the Indian Ocean,” Dr Crowther says.

"Even things like musical instruments and other flora such as taro, banana and yam provide commonalities with Asia, but without establishing an irrefutable link.

Nobody has previously been able to put a precise timeframe on when these were transplanted, and we’ve lacked the reasons. Why did this happen? How did it happen? Which way did people from South-East Asia travel to arrive there?

Knowing whether people came direct across the Indian Ocean, or whether they sailed around the rim of the Indian subcontinent, Middle East and East Africa has been very difficult to establish because of the way they lived and the very few traces left behind.

What is even more difficult is tracing the origins in South-East Asia, because just as East Africa was changing, Asia was incredibly dynamic and with a lot of interaction and movement over the last 1000 years.

Indeed, there were extremely mobile maritime societies who recruited people from far and wide to be part of their powerful seafaring forces.”

The amount of material change we have made to the Earth – urban development, discarded consumables, and human manipulation of the natural environment – makes the microbes on our teeth seem almost insignificant to future generations for tracing our history.

Even if there was a ‘digital apocalypse’ that erased the internet and our seemingly endless sources of data and records, we would leave behind remnants that cluttered the Earth for thousands of years.

“I think about the scale of the impact we’re having and it’s a little scary,” Dr Crowther says.

“We are fundamentally reshaping the planet. It’s so much more transformative than what occurred in the past.

At the same time, I think it’s important to acknowledge humans have been creating novel ecosystems by moving plants and animals around for longer than we may normally consider.

Studying Madagascar and the Comoros provides a new perspective about the role humans have played in shaping the Earth and, without diminishing the gravity of the changes we are presently making, we can use archaeology to inform decisions.

By understanding where we have been and where we are going, we can direct ourselves to sustainable, prosperous futures.”

Having focused on the Pacific Islands early in her career, Dr Crowther says there are some parallels between Australia’s neighbors and the islands off East Africa.

However, she noted there were distinct differences which made understanding Madagascar and the Comoros a challenging progression.

“In the Pacific I studied people who colonized uninhabited islands, whereas my latest work involves greater detail on the interactions between different communities,” Dr Crowther says.

 “But, in terms of methodology, yes you still see overlap in the details that offer insight. Many of the techniques we apply are the same, as are the types of plants and animals that we study in order to human movement.”