Crossing the Green Sea: maritime mobility, trans-oceanic interaction and remote island colonisation in the tropical Indian Ocean

Most of about eighty habitable islands in the tropical Indian Ocean have no record of prehistoric human occupation despite archaeological, ethnological, biological, and linguistic evidence of direct contact between East Africa and Southeast Asia in antiquity, especially by Austronesian-speaking Asians who colonised Madagascar about the fifth century AD. This proposal will undertake archaeological and palaeo-environmental investigations in Madagascar, Seychelles, Chagos and Maldives (the Green sea voyaging corridor) seeking clear evidence of prehistoric human presence or absence and of the timing, nature and origins of trans-oceanic movement. The data will bring the Indian Ocean into the global discourse on maritime mobility.