Invited review articleProspects and pitfalls in integrating volcanology and archaeology: A review
Introduction
In 1762, Johann Winckelmann reported on the discoveries of the ancient Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, buried by the 79 CE eruption of Mount Vesuvius, around present-day Naples (Winckelmann, 1762). These discoveries were instrumental in the development of archaeology as a scientific discipline and in raising public awareness of how past volcanism has interacted with contemporaneous societies (Schnapp, 1996; Trigger, 2006). Around the same time, volcanology was developing its scientific foundation, too, and the many artistic and textual representations of the excavations and the eruptions of Vesuvius in 1767 and 1794 by William Hamilton and others are an integral part of volcanology's own intellectual genesis (e.g. Kozák and Cermák, 2010; Pyle, 2017; Sigurdsson, 2015). Indeed, the notion of a moment frozen in time coupled with the somewhat unsavoury dark heritage appeal of the memento mori represented by Pompeii (cf. Scarlett and Riede, 2019) has given rise to an obstinate idiom employed to label supposedly similar scenarios elsewhere (Holmberg, 2013) as we well as to countless dramatizations of the two cities' fiery demise (Pomeroy, 2008).
Beginning with the landmark publication by Sheets and Grayson (1979) more than 40 years ago, numerous edited volumes have formed a consistent if perhaps somewhat ad hoc scaffold for what can be termed ‘archaeological volcanology’ (Barnes and Soda, 2019; Grattan and Torrence, 2007; McGuire et al., 2000; Riede, 2015; Torrence and Grattan, 2002). Supporting this scaffold are many special issues devoted to this topic, most often published in broad-interest Quaternary science journals (e.g. Cashman and Giordano, 2008; Riede, 2016). Furthermore, dedicated albeit usually brief chapters that conjoin the topics of past volcanism and archaeology also feature in major volcanological and archaeological overview resources such as the Encyclopedia of Volcanology (Sheets, 2015), the Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology (Riede, 2020), or the Encyclopedia of Archaeological Sciences (Elson and Ort, 2018).
Despite this substantial body of work, epistemic and practical challenges to working across disciplines remain. For instance, in many textbook introductions to volcanology, the discussions of archaeology and, more broadly, discussions of humanities/social science contributions are placed at the end and afforded much less depth (e.g. Lockwood and Hazlett, 2010). Conversely, standard textbooks in archaeology afford little space to volcanoes and their eruptions, although many such books do place considerable emphasis on the broader relationship between climatic and environmental changes and changes in culture (e.g. Cunliffe, 2015; McCorriston and Field, 2020; Scarre, 2005). These observations are not meant to suggest that all textbooks in volcanology need to be re-written to include extensive treatments of social science/humanities approaches, theories, and methods. The latter discipline's corpus of literature here is extensive, highly diverse as well as notoriously contradictory. As an echo of John Snow's acrimonious ‘two culture’ rhetoric (cf. Snow, 1959), these differences in prioritisation do hint, in our view, at deep-seated differences in epistemic standards and intellectual practices across these two disciplines which often lead to major differences in the ways in which data are generated, analysed, and interpreted. In very concrete terms, this rift between natural scientific and engineering approaches to hazards and disasters on the one hand and social science and humanities approaches on the other finds its expression in marked differences in funding (see Alexander, 1995, Alexander, 1997). These historical contingencies have left us with a form of “subordinate interdisciplinarity” (Padberg, 2014, p. 104) reflected in substantially different professional incentives, terminologies, core conferences, journals, and education and funding structures.
It is not often that the divisions between volcanology and archaeology make headlines but in the summer of 2019, news articles with titles such as ‘Pompeii row eruptions between rival scientific factions’ (Devlin, 2019) and declarations that irresponsible excavation at the iconic site embodies an ‘act of vandalism to volcanology’ (Solly, 2019) appeared in high-profile journalism outlets. These were the result of a letter published in Nature by Scandone et al. (2019) imploring that the shared heritage that the site represents requires conservation of not only the culture history but also the geological history that the stratigraphy holds. As the authors of the letter stated, “these archaeological and volcanic histories together offer a unique insight into how societies live and die in the shadow of a volcano. It is alarming, therefore, that volcanic deposits are being sacrificed during archaeological excavations” (Scandone et al., 2019, p. 174).
In contrast to the balance of funding in favour of volcanology, at the iconic site of Pompeii, the higher enthusiasm of the tourist public for the archaeological remains and the large amount of political support and funding from Italian and EU sources for the Great Pompeii Project that launched in 2012 make archaeology the dominant field. The volcanologists counter that the high price of valuing one of the sciences over the other in such a site leads to an impoverished image of the fuller context. In the case of Vesuvius, arguably, the destruction of the past deposits endangers life in the case of future eruptions as it prevents a greater understanding of the volcano's past behaviour. As volcanologist Chris Kilburn explains (Solly, 2019), the conjoined context is essential as the archaeological remains can indicate how the pyroclastic flows swept around buildings in order to improve building methods both there and elsewhere in the world and protect future populations. We can think of no better reason for the conjoined archaeological volcanology perspective than this.
The present review is part of a special issue with the title ‘Environmental and societal impacts of past volcanic eruptions – integrating the geosciences with the historical, anthropological, and archaeological sciences’; our review is a community effort that has been sourced through repeated conference sessions – at major meetings such as the Cities on Volcanoes (CoV) conferences, the WAC (World Archaeological Congress) and Society for American Archaeology (SAA) meetings, and the European Geosciences Union (EGU) and INQUA (International Union for Quaternary Research) congresses – throughout the last years and our combined decades-long experience working at the interface between volcanology and archaeology. It also draws more tacitly on our experiences writing, editing – not least those of the special issue at hand – and reviewing papers that are intended to be read across disciplines. In this review, we seek not to critique but to reflect on how we as archaeologists and volcanologists together can take our interdisciplinary endeavour forward. This contribution therefore seeks to survey the current disciplinary landscape that makes up the territory in which archaeological volcanologists operate. In doing so, we map out the prospects and pitfalls of combining volcanological and archaeological perspectives. We here draw specifically on a range of case studies, each of which addresses different aspects and analytical scales – from a single site to a region to a continent; from a Pompeii-like moment to time measured in multiple generations – at the intersection between archaeology and volcanology. Through the presentation of these cases we reflect on where archaeological expertise and data can make a contribution to the larger endeavour of better understanding past human societies, their histories and interactions with volcanism as well as better understanding past volcanism itself. In reviewing these cases, we argue for a judicious rejection of sensationalist claims of human impacts while not forgetting that the human dimensions brought into play by the investigation of past impacts can make a substantial impact on how volcanic risks are understood in the present. We highlight the already existing methodological overlap between the concerned disciplines around sediments, stratigraphies and maps, but we also stress that, as a humanities/social science discipline, archaeology has much more to offer in terms of understanding past human interactions with volcanoes and their eruptions in a theoretically and empirically grounded manner. On this combined basis, we argue, archaeological volcanology could assist in uncovering deeper understandings of these interactions in the past and contribute to reducing risk in the present and future.
Section snippets
Disciplinary relationships
Volcanology is a subfield of geology concerned with the full spectrum of volcanic activity, its origin, and its products. Geoarchaeology is a specialized subfield of archaeology aimed at understanding past human life, site formation processes, and the origin and circulation of raw materials. Geoarchaeology uses methods adopted and adapted from geology (Pollard, 1999) that increasingly utilize digital and remote sensing techniques (e.g. Siart et al., 2018). Geoarchaeology nests within a wider
Journal rankings and impact factors
Each academic discipline and its various sub-disciplines have their own specific societies and attendant publication outlets; archaeology and volcanology are no exception. While major interdisciplinary conferences in principle offer meeting places, such conferences are often prohibitively expensive and are very strongly biased towards disciplinary in-groups in their attendance. The difference in journal outlets is expressed clearly in a heuristic survey of ranked journal lists and their impact
Bridging epistemic differences in integrating the geosciences with the historical, anthropological, and archaeological sciences
Rightly, climate change and extreme events afford a great deal of public, political and scientific interest. Volcanic eruptions have been in the limelight of this interest because they have been identified as important contributors to climate change, both past (e.g. Fiedel et al., 1995; Sigl et al., 2015; Zielinski, 2000) as well as future (Bethke et al., 2017). In part, these high-profile studies are driven by the increasing number of major ice-coring projects that – thanks to major
From strata to societies
In the above, we have used the sixth-century CE case study to demonstrate the disciplinary imbalance between volcanology and the historical sciences, not in attempt to put blame or to criticise any of the cited work. Instead, we used the case to chart the epistemic and practical differences in the generation, handling, and interpretation of data. The sixth-century case study is also particularly complex as it involves global processes, multiple complex and large datasets, and multiple steps of
Archaeological volcanology and volcanic risk communication
In regions such as Japan, understanding the risks posed by its many volcanoes is vital for risk reduction. Adding elements of human impacts lends strong affective elements to how risks, resilience and vulnerability can be discussed not only as a feature of the natural environment but also as properties contingent on societal constellations (cf. Barclay et al., 2008). The Kirishima volcano group in Kyushu, Japan has erupted many times since the above listings and tephra impacts are more
Lessons learned and future perspectives
The twenty-first century and its era of wide-ranging changes in the Earth system make improved understanding of the complex intersections between the geophysical world and human cultures of critical importance (e.g. Florindo and McEntee, 2020). This period also overlaps with what is called by some the ‘environmental turn’ or even the ‘geological turn’ in the humanities (e.g. Dear, 2015; Bonneuil, 2015; Yusoff, 2013, Yusoff, 2018). The challenge of integrating multiple disciplines across social
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Felix Riede: Conceptualization, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Gina L. Barnes: Conceptualization, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Mark D. Elson: Writing - original draft. Gerald A. Oetelaar: Writing - original draft. Karen G. Holmberg: Conceptualization, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Payson Sheets: Writing - original draft.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
This work has been conducted in the context of grants awarded to FR by the Independent Research Fund Denmark (#11-106336/11-120673 and #6107-00059B). The Chaiten fieldwork cited in this discussion was invited by the Fundacion ProCultura in Chile and funded by a National Geographic Research Grant (NGS-185C-18) awarded to PI Karen Holmberg.
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