• DOI:10.1080/00672700709480452
• Corpus ID: 162594865

Island subsistence: hunting, trapping and the translocation of wildlife in the Western Indian Ocean

@article{Walsh2007IslandSH,
  title={Island subsistence: hunting, trapping and the translocation of wildlife in the Western Indian Ocean},
  author={Martin T. Walsh},
  journal={Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa},
  year={2007},
  volume={42},
  pages={113 - 83}
}

• M. Walsh
• Published 1 January 2007
• History
• Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa

Researchers have recently begun to re-examine the settlement of the islands of the Western Indian Ocean from multi-disciplinary perspectives that incorporate evidence from both the natural and human sciences (Blench, this volume; Hurles et al. 2005; Mitchell 2004,2005). In this and other respects the study of the maritime heritage of the Indian Ocean lags behind that of the Pacific, where the history of human colonisation is the subject of lively interdisciplinary debate (cf. Hurles et al. 2003). One particularly fertile area of research has been the historical ecology of oceanic islands and analysis of the environmental impacts of human settlement and subsistence practices (Kirch and Hunt 1997). In the Western Indian Ocean Madagascar has been the focus of this kind of investigation (Goodman and Patterson 1997), but it has not been extended to other islands or integrated with study of their settlement histories. In this paper I will make a preliminary attempt to do so, by reviewing the cultural and biological evidence for people’s interactions with the terrestrial fauna of island archipelagos that lie between East Africa and Madagascar. I will argue that the significance of hunting, trapping and the translocation of wild animals has been greatly underestimated in previous histories of this region. The evidence presented here evokes a number of historical hypotheses, some contrary to received wisdom, about the settlement of the islands and relations between the communities involved. It also suggests some general correlations between island biogeography and human settlement that can be compared to observations based on research in Oceania.