Prize-winning study on the effects of one of the largest volcanic eruptions of the Holocene changes the way archaeologists think about the effects of natural disasters on past peoples.
The Ben Cullen prize is one of two prizes awarded each year by the Antiquity Trust for research articles published in the journal, Antiquity. This year's winner examined the effects of a ‘super-eruption’ in south-western Japan, showing how Jōmon communities responded to and bounced back from natural disasters.
Japan’s southern islands were occupied during prehistory by hunter-gatherers, who thrived in rich ecosystems. However, this all changed 7,300 years ago when the submerged Kikai Caldera erupted.
This was one of the largest volcanic events since the end of the Ice Age and was so huge that it has been termed the Kikai-Akahoya ‘super-eruption’.
Human life on Tanegashima Island, located south of Japan’s southernmost major island of Kyushu, was devastated by the eruption and the island was depopulated for centuries. It was, however, eventually resettled.
To examine the effects of major volcanic activity on forager communities, the authors reconstructed life on Tanegashima island before and after the eruption. They used a multi-disciplinary approach, looking at vegetation, settlement patterns, cooking traditions and food processing tools.
Their results were published in the journal Antiquity in June 2023 and have been awarded the 2024 Ben Cullen prize.
“We are surprised, thrilled, and of course deeply honoured to be awarded this international prize,” says Peter Jordan, Professor of Archaeology at Lund University, who designed and leads the research. “This is very much a team effort, bringing together researchers and institutions from across Sweden and Japan.”
Before the eruption, the island was covered in evergreen forest. Settlements were large and a wide variety of tools found suggest the population were exploiting terrestrial, coastal, and riverine resources.
The eruption wiped out the flora and fauna of the island, and its human inhabitants. The area was left a wasteland covered in ash, remaining unoccupied for centuries.
Hundreds of years later, when people began to resettle the island, they were faced with a much harsher grassland environment. Settlements were smaller and more ephemeral, whilst tools suggest the occupants changed their diets to exploit marine resources and tubers, which recovered more quickly than other plants and animals.
Archaeologists typically look at the impact of natural disasters in terms of ‘collapse’ versus ‘resilience’, based on whether societies were wiped out or managed to survive.
This research shows, however, that neither model captures the changes associated with how societies respond to catastrophic volcanic eruptions.
“We know there was massive loss of life, because evidence of human settlement drops away alarmingly and many large sites are abandoned under the ash,” states co-author Professor Mitsuhiro Kuwahata of Kyushu University. “At the same time, some people did survive as we see direct continuity in some of their most iconic cultural traditions”.
Whilst the population of Tanegashima Island was destroyed by the Kikai-Akahoya eruption, those who resettled the island were still part of the same Jōmon culture, albeit with their subsistence strategies significantly changed by the event.
“Overall, the paper looks at this long post-disaster recovery process and questions the simplistic framing of ‘resilience’ as a process of rebounding, unchanged, to a previous state,” says Professor Jordan. “Instead, these Jōmon communities were constantly changing and adapting, and constantly developing new ways of life, long before the eruption and also long after.”