The Peopling of Madagascar and Africa's Indian Ocean Islands (cont'd) (From UNESCO General History of Africa) On the historiography of Madagascar and an indigenous Malagasy script!
The destruction of megafauna in Madagascar due to human activities
T h e present-day vegetation of Madagascar is generally considered to be the direct or indirect result of huma n activity. Th e disappearance, about the beginning of the present millennium, of some animals (large lemurs, large 'ostriches' or Aepyornis, large land tortoises, giant crocodiles, dwarf hippopotamuses, etc. ) that lived in this original environment, and whose cemeteries are to be found often around old water points, seems at least to indicate that there had already been a considerable change in the forest cover, even if it ma y also be supposed that there was also a period of relatively lower rainfall in order to explain the drying up of some regions.
Metal-working in Madagascar
However, copper, which was to enjoy great fortune in later periods, seems at first to have led there only to craft jewellery production notably of the vangovango bracelets with a broken ring that have been found as far away as Irodo and that are still called, even when they are made of silver, by the name haba. Once again, the linguistic associations are interesting. Th e Cham haban and the curu saban both mean copper in the continental Austronesian domain ; 3 8 saba in both Malagasy and in Comor - ian is still the usual word for copper today.39
Iron was exploited in significant quantities. Here, the metal does not seem to have been worked on the spot, since the usual practice of re-use, attested to by ethnography, is not enough to explain the striking contrast between the abundance of traces of exploitation of the ore (ashes, charcoal, slag) and the virtual absence of iron objects, the sites of the period having yielded only one bracelet (Andranosoa), a harpoon and fish-hooks (Talaky). T o this might be added - in a country where the existence of stone tools has not yet been attested - marks of axes and knives on bones (Andaro, Andranosoa). N o doubt the smelted products were largely exported through Talaky, whose development, if not its foundation, thus appears to be linked to its role as an outlet to the sea of export products from the interior, which moreover were apparently not limited to smelted products.
Animal rearing and protein-consumption
Sheep skins ma y have been a second export product. An d it ma y well be that the large surplus of meat that was thus obtained was salted and smoked, using techniques of preservation known to have existed at the time. This preserved meat could naturally have been a third export product. But, if the maritime traffic was heavy, this meat probably served mostly to supply the boats. No r is it impossible that some of it was destined for local consumption. It is already quite certain that these inhabitants of the interior in the south who , following the traditional Malagasy way of doing things,4 ' used a very refined cuisine based on boiling and sophisti- cated methods of preparing meat (art of carving, etc.),42 were at least not deficient in animal proteins.