Kristina Douglass was doing the dishes in her slippers when she received the call from the MacArthur Foundation, giving her the news that she had received a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship.
"I told them I was in my office," she recalls, "but really I was at the kitchen sink, looking as surprised and stunned as I felt. It was a very surreal moment."
Douglass, an archaeologist at Columbia University, received the $800,000 award for her research "investigating how past human societies and environments co-evolved and adapted to climate variability."
To explore this question, she conducts much of her fieldwork in southwest Madagascar, "a place where the coral reef, very clear blue waters, meet a dry desert vegetation scape," she says. "It's the most amazing landscape I've ever been in."
This corner of the island nation is inhabited by a diverse mosaic of human communities — and has been for millennia. Some focus on fishing in the ocean or among the mangroves, others on herding zebu cattle, and still others on harvesting resources from the forest.
Douglass says the people living there have grappled with environmental and climate change for generations, including fluctuations in precipitation patterns and sea surface temperatures. In her work, she pores over archaeological artifacts and animal remains to piece together the strategies they've long used to cope with these challenges.
And she believes that through the numerous shards of pottery and fragments of bone that she and her colleagues have unearthed, the historic people of this part of Madagascar may well have lessons from which we can all learn.
A revealing bike trip
Douglass' parents worked in international development and public health, which meant that she and her three siblings grew up all over the world — in Cameroon, Kenya, Rwanda and Ukraine. But they spent the longest stretch of time, about a decade, in the central highlands of Madagascar, a landscape of terraced rice fields and stout pyramids of freshly baked bricks.
In the eighth grade, she and her classmates went on a three-week, nearly 400-mile mountain biking trip along the remote Masoala Peninsula in the northeast. "I will never understand the bravery of the teacher," Douglass says with admiration. As she careened down muddy slopes in the rainforest, she was struck by towering limestone cliffs and the dizzying abundance of biodiversity.
"But what I remember the most about that trip," she says, "is getting to stop in small communities along the way and hearing people talk about the issues that they were facing."
While growing up in Madagascar, Douglass had heard the pervasive idea that rural communities like those on the peninsula were intent on cutting down the last remnants of pristine forest for slash and burn agriculture. But on that biking trip, she encountered a different reality.
The Malagasy she met lived in close relationship with their environment, relying on local fisheries and using plants for food, medicine and materials. In other words, "they were part of that ecosystem, not an external threat to it," Douglass says. "Life there was nothing like what people were saying life there was like."
It's a lesson that embedded itself within her.
Later, as a Ph.D. student at Yale University, Douglass was drawn to know more about "who the early Malagasy were and how they interacted with [their] environment," she says.
She began by investigating what drove the ancient megafauna of Madagascar to extinction about a thousand years ago. These animals included "giant lemurs the size of an adult human, large crocodiles and pygmy hippopotamuses, and an animal near and dear to my heart — the elephant bird," she says. "The largest of these [birds] would have towered over 10 feet tall, weighed over one ton and laid eggs that are roughly 180 times the size of a chicken egg."
Researchers had suggested that this extraordinary array of creatures was decimated through hunting by the people who originally settled the island. But she found that explanation unsatisfying. "The amount of evidence that we have in the archaeological record — in the form of animal bones or other remains that testified to the relationships people had with these animals — were pretty scarce," she says.
Thinking back to what she learned from her mountain biking experience, Douglass decided to go see for herself. She traveled to southwest Madagascar and, working with Malagasy collaborators, went "looking through the trash from ancient kitchens to understand if people really did hunt these animals to extinction," she says.
Douglass and her research team found little evidence to support the idea. Instead, they concluded that multiple indirect and overlapping pressures may have led to the large animals' demise, including competition over fresh water with domesticated livestock and reductions in habitat due to changes in climate and vegetation.
Douglass advises against starting from the assumption that people arrive somewhere and immediately begin to degrade the environment. "It's always more complicated than that," she says. "People become part of a place, shaping conditions for themselves and for other beings."
Thinking that Indigenous people inevitably ruin the natural world has led to policies that "protect plants, animals, environments from local people," she says. And because "Indigenous communities, local communities are some of the most important guardians and stewards of biodiversity worldwide, you're essentially evicting people who have been key stewards of those landscapes and seascapes over many generations."
Douglass believes that the kind of archaeology she's doing can provide a clearer picture of how human communities have co-evolved alongside the natural world around them — and that such an understanding will help inform how we think about preserving our planet today.
Out of the shards, a message
Douglass continued studying how the Malagasy have interacted with and adapted to their changing environment and climate over time.
To puzzle that out, Douglass looked for clues of social identity and affiliation among ancient artifacts. If ceramic cooking pots from different locations were made out of the same clay or decorated similarly, for instance, that would suggest there may have been social linkages between the communities that fashioned the pots. The same thing goes for the kinds of shells that people made into beads.
"These aren't the same ways that we might map out community affiliations today," says Douglass. "Today, we might turn to Facebook and see if people have the same interest groups. But in a way, we're using a similar approach. We're trying to identify signals in materials that people leave behind that suggests that they had links to one another."
This work revealed a key strategy that has enabled communities in southwest Madagascar to handle change historically — the maintaining of a diverse social network. Such a network allows "people to lean on different kinds of relationships with other communities at different times, depending on their needs," Douglass says, especially during periods of difficulty.
Learning from trash
Douglass has also excavated ancient, discarded kitchen waste, including the remains of fish, shellfish, birds, mammals and domesticated livestock. (This is an example, she says, of archaeologists doing the best they can to use tiny fragments to reconstruct the past and make "a lot out of a little.") Those food remains shifted over time, revealing a second tactic that communities in this part of the world have employed to handle change: the capacity to "[weave] together different skills and sources of subsistence," Douglass says. In other words, people have shifted between coastal fishing, dry forest harvesting and hunting based on the local conditions.
A third strategy that emerged out of surveying sites across the landscape is one of mobility. "Knowing that if there is a climate downturn, if there's a drought in the area that you rely on, you have the option to move," says Douglass. "And you move near and far depending on the circumstances."
Combined, she says these three notions of mobility, flexible livelihood and diverse social networks point to a broader lesson that communities today can learn from the historic people of Madagascar. "When you're dealing with environmental and climate change," Douglass says, "you want to have the biggest basket of potential strategies as possible to pick from and the flexibility to pick what is going to work best in that particular moment in that particular place."
Douglass admits that the scale of planetwide change that we're witnessing now is more extreme than in the past and that it's compounded by gaping global inequality. This combination of forces challenges the livelihoods and adaptability of people everywhere, including in Madagascar. "So that led me to think a lot about knowledge transmission" across many generations, she says. "How do people pass on information about the experiences that allowed them to successfully adapt and survive change?"
She concludes that, no matter our lineage, we all carry precious knowledge, including "ecological insights, oral histories, embodied practices. Knowledge flows through many channels, including ancestral lines, lived experiences, stories, and landscapes." Douglass contemplates not just how societies adapt to change, but how they transmit that wisdom and information, especially through music, movement, and communal feasts.
"If your community has traditions like that, it is likely part of a deeply rooted adaptive capacity," she says. "Adaptation can also be joy and celebration and so many other things. And I believe that if we invest more in the kinds of practices that build community, we're going to be in a much stronger place to deal with the changes that are coming."
Douglass says her multifaceted identity, forged across multiple countries as a young person and being forever surrounded by diverse communities, has given her a kind of stamina to weave together the fragmentary strands of knowledge and history buried in Madagascar.
And it is out of these fragments that Douglass is distilling a human story we may all benefit from.
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