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Many communities in southwestern Madagascar rely on a mix of foraging, fishing, farming, and herding, with cattle central to local cultures, rituals, and intergenerational wealth transfer. Today these livelihoods are critically threatened by the intensifying effects of climate change and biodiversity loss. Improved understanding of ancient community-environment dynamics can help identify pathways to livelihood sustainability. Multidisciplinary approaches have great potential to improve our understanding of human-environment interactions across spatio-temporal scales. We combine archaeological survey data, oral history interviews, and high-resolution multispectral PlanetScope imagery to explore 400 years of human-environment interaction in the Namonte Basin. Our analysis reveals that settlement and land-use led to significant changes in the region’s ecology, both during periods of occupation and after settlement abandonment. Human activity over this period may have stabilized vegetative systems, whereby seasonal changes in vegetative health were reduced compared to surrounding locations. These ecological legacies may have buffered communities against unpredictable climate challenges. 

For the last seven years, PlanetScope satellites have started near-daily imaging of parts of the Earth’s surface, making high-density multitemporal, multispectral, 3-m pixel imagery accessible to researchers. Multitemporal satellite data enables landscape archaeologists to examine changes in environmental conditions at time scales ranging from daily to decadal. This kind of temporal resolution can accentuate landscape features on the ground by de-emphasizing non-permanent signatures caused by seasonal or even daily changes in vegetation. We argue that the availability of high spatial and temporal resolution multispectral imagery from Planet Inc. will enable new approaches to studying archaeological visibility in landscapes. While palimpsests are discrete overlapping layers of material accumulation, multitemporal composites capture cyclical and seasonal time and can be used to interpret past landscape histories at multiple scales. To illustrate this perspective, we present three case studies using PlanetScope imagery in tropical environments on the Indian Ocean islands of Madagascar, Mauritius, and Zanzibar. 

La mayoría de túmulos del este de Norteamérica han sido destruidos-¿o no? Nosotros revisamos los métodos geofísicos para evaluar si los túmulos nivelados retienen depósitos o rasgos intactos. Una encuesta magnética da esperanzas de encontrar y evaluar los túmulos nivelados porque es rápida y sensitiva a las variaciones magnéticas asociadas con rasgos anticipados como hoyos y depósitos de relleno de túmulos. Como estudio de caso, hablamos sobre nuestro estudio magnético del sitio de Gast Farm (13LA12) en el este de Iowa. La encuesta abarcó 8,64 ha, cubriendo tanto como sitios de un túmulo previamente reportado y posibles movimientos de tierra geométricos, así como áreas de habitación de los períodos Middle y Late Woodland. La interpretación de los resultados de la encuesta incorporó la diferenciación cuantitativa de los tipos de anomalías magnéticas utilizando técnicas del sistema de información geográfica (SIG), junto con la inspección visual estándar. No encontramos ninguna evidencia de movimientos de tierra geométricos, pero identificamos al menos seis túmulos nivelados. El relleno del túmulo desplazado parece explicar las características de movimiento de tierras. Concluimos que los túmulos nivelados son detectables y pueden retener la integridad del subsuperficie. Sus características asociadas, incluidos los entierros, pueden ser identificables incluso cuando la evidencia sobre la tierra ha desaparecido.