Archaeological excavations on Madagascar’s Sainte-Marie Island are providing tangible evidence of the complex world surrounding piracy in the Indian Ocean. Researchers recovered valuable objects from a shipwreck and identified traces of a smuggling and slave-trading post that operated from the 1690s into the 1730s.
The underwater investigations, carried out in 2024 and 2025 by a Franco-Malagasy team, focused on one of eight known and authenticated pirate shipwrecks worldwide. The wreck lies off the coast of Nosy Boraha, at a depth of seven metres and roughly 40 metres from shore.
Among the finds were an Indo-Portuguese ivory statuette of Saint John made in Goa in the 17th century, blue-and-white Chinese porcelain cups, an Ottoman terracotta pipe and ceramic bottles from the Ottoman Empire. Researchers also identified 14 gold coins minted between 1659 and 1718 in the Dutch Republic, Venice, the Holy Roman Empire and the Mughal Empire in India.
The team analysed around 1,500 newly collected objects and supplemented the underwater work with archaeological excavations on land. On an islet at the entrance to Ambodifotatra Bay, those digs revealed physical remains linked to a trading post involved in smuggling and the slave trade. They also documented evidence of exchanges with the Betsimisaraka, the local population at the time.
The site had previously been explored between 2010 and 2015 by an American shipwreck-hunting team, but its findings were challenged by UNESCO. The more recent research is intended to move beyond the popular image of piracy as a story centred solely on conflict and plunder.
Jean Soulat, the chief archaeologist of both expeditions, said the discoveries marked a shift “from myth to concrete traces”. His work examines commercial exchanges, shared practices and cultural mixing alongside violence and looting. He launched the Archaeology of Piracy programme in 2019 with support from the universities of Caen and Paris-I, in a field that remains relatively underdeveloped.
According to Soulat, comparing archives, oral traditions and material remains allows researchers to test different accounts of the past. The discoveries in Sainte-Marie therefore present piracy as part of a wider network of trade, smuggling, forced movement and interaction in the Indian Ocean at the turn of the 18th century.
Sources: Le Monde Sciences.