The selective geography of volcanism in oral traditions

Abstract

Oral traditions describing details of ancient volcanic eruptions and their effects survive throughout the inhabited world. Many such eruptions, especially those having catastrophic environmental and societal consequences, proved sufficiently memorable to form the basis of enduring oral traditions. Using global databases, we identified 2306 such eruptions from 477 inhabited locations that occurred before the start of the Common Era (CE) and are therefore likely to have been the subject of oral traditions. Of these, we selected 20 events (‘remembered’ Holocene eruptions) for which there are extant oral (-derived) traditions that demonstrate how such traditions can reveal details of past volcanism that often are undetectable by retrodictive geoscientific enquiry. We also selected 20 events (‘forgotten’ Holocene eruptions) about which no oral traditions are known and discuss the possible reasons for this. Such oral traditions, while often challenging for conventionally trained geoscientists to interpret, are valuable yet largely overlooked sources of information about the nature and effects of Holocene volcanism that can usefully complement geoscientific enquiry. In particular, we identified locations where memories of such volcanism appear ‘forgotten’ in the hope that scientists might focus their attention on revealing, identifying, and analyzing local traditions.