Who Cut Niches Into the Cliffs at Madagascar’s Isalo National Park?

ISALO NATIONAL PARK, MADAGASCAR—According to a Phys.org report, Guido Schreurs of the University of Bern and his colleagues suggest that rock-cut terraces and chambers at the remote archaeological site of Teniky in southern Madagascar were carved some 1,000 years ago by a Zoroastrian community. High-resolution satellite images revealed that Teniky was much larger than previously thought. Schreurs and his colleagues then identified dozens of circular and rectangular stone niches carved into the cliffs. Circular recesses in these niches may have been used to close the spaces with wooden or stone slabs, he explained. Charcoal and pottery recovered during the investigation have been dated from the tenth through the twelfth centuries A.D. Made in Southeast Asia, the pottery also suggests that the people who carved these niches were connected to the Indian Ocean trade network. Schreurs thinks these structures in Madagascar resemble stone-cut niches in Iran, and “most archaeologists associate the niches in Iran with Zoroastrian funeral rites,” he said. Communities on Iran’s coast, including the port town of Siraf, are known to have been involved in maritime trade, sailing as far as China and East Africa, he added. “Although I would like to stress that our interpretation linking the rock-cut architecture with Zoroastrian practices is tentative, the stylistic similarities of the stone basins and tables found at Teniky and those used in Zoroastrian ritual ceremonies [also] seem to point in the same direction,” he concluded. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa. For more on the origin of Zoroastrianism, go to "Searching for Lost Cities: Medieval Mountain Citadel."