Discussion

The above examples demonstrate a range of scenarios where volcanism has or has not been considered as one of the drivers for cultural development or change in archaeological, natural science, and anthropological studies. A series of inferences can be made from these examples that reflect the relationship between humans and volcanoes in the southwest Pacific, and give rise to potential new areas of research between the fields of volcanology, archaeology, and anthropology. The southwest Pacific is similar to many other areas of the globe in that volcanic sites were favored for settlement because of their natural resources. This means that there has been a concurrence of people and eruptions for several thousand years in many parts of remote Oceania, or several tens of thousand years in near Oceania. Outside the southwest Pacific region, a similar range of volcanic impacts on past societies has been identified and hypothesized.

Large-scale catastrophic volcanic impacts have not yet been confirmed in the southwest Pacific. The examples of apparent catastrophes at the Vanuatu volcanoes of Kuwae and Ambrym do not stand up to closer geological and anthropological scrutiny. Targeted archaeological studies in these areas could help shed light on interactions between humans and these volcanoes. At present it appears that the claims of volcanic catastrophes have at times been overplayed in the region. Elsewhere, aside from the AD 79 Vesuvius events and the debated Minoan/Santorini cultural catastrophe, an extremely large eruption of Volctin Ilopango in El Salvador was inferred to have been catastrophic for central and western El Salvador. This has also been proposed as the cause of a 100-150 year-duration demographic collapse for a broad region - well outside of the eruption’s direct impacts. The causes of this collapse were thought to stem from a combination of: direct impacts, evacuations, starvation, and regional economic fallout. Similarly, a huge AD 720 eruption of the White River volcano in Alaska caused long-term depopulation of the nearby region and a major migration of people recorded in oral traditions. In all of these cases outside the southwest Pacific, the eruptions have been of a type and magnitude that is very rare in the region. Most eruptions of this enormity appear to have been deep submarine events in the southwest Pacific, and hence of less potential threat to the regional population.

The scale of volcanism, in terms of explosive violence and the distribution and inundation-thickness of products appears to be the major control on whether cultural disasters or traumas may occur and be represented in the archaeological or anthropologic record. In the brief timeframe of human occupation of the southwest Pacific, oral traditions are a powerful additional tool for understanding the cultural and geological history of an area. In relation to volcanism, it appears that, the larger scale of a volcanic event, the better chance there is of generating long-lived oral traditions.

Volcanism has not hindered settlement and the ongoing habitation of Pacific Islands. Volcanoes would have been familiar to the people responsible for the rapid colonization remote Oceania (associated with Lapita ceramic traditions), since they derived-from or passed through the Bismark Archipelago, with its abundance of active volcanoes. Once settled into remote Oceania, however, eruptions often led to abandonment of habitation sites for several hundred years. Hence archaeological records are often piecemeal on volcanic islands, with distinct cultural levels located between primary volcanic deposits (e. g., Figure 4). It is often difficult, however, to determine if the impacts on these populations were sudden or fatal, or whether they were able to move away in time to avoid destructive impacts. Some cases show clear evidence where human remains are incorporated within volcanic deposits generated by violent processes (e. g., Kadavu; Fiji). Other cases, especially where the impacts were localized, show that people in nearby areas may have carried on life as normal (e. g., Taveuni, Fiji). On a similar scale/magnitude, sedentary village lifestyles and cultivations were effectively uninterrupted by repeated explosive volcanism from Arenal Volcano in Costa Rica. This was put down to a relatively ‘simple’ culture that was more resilient to volcanic impacts than those more strongly affected by the Ilopango eruption in El Salvador. However, the Arenal eruptions are of a type that generates mostly ash fall downwind of the volcano. Hence these events would have had little chance for causing fatalities, and in this humid environment, rapid revegetation and weathering of tephra would have occurred, enabling a rapid community recovery. More serious cultural disruptions are recorded in the southwest-Pacific analogous archipelago environment of the Aleutians. The Aleutian case shows, however, that despite direct impacts on the populations and its food sources, populations persisted, although starvation and warfare may have been the resulting cultural cost.

The southwest Pacific examples show that volca-nism, if frequent or with similar repeated impacts, leads to development of cultural practices that are passed down through oral tradition to allow later communities to mitigate impacts. This leads to the preservation of distinctive cultures or tribes even following the most devastating volcanic disasters - such as in the Savo Island example of the Solomon Islands. Volcanism appears to have also led to other coping strategies, including preferential avoidance of areas for settlement as well as agricultural practices to improve resilience of communities. Although not part of the southwest Pacific, Hawai’i shares the same setting and human culture. Here, the volcanism is not normally violent, similar to Samoa or Taveuni. Response to past lava flows has led to local upheavals for the Hawaiians, but they persisted in the area and incorporated volcanism and all its characters and moods in strong oral and spiritual traditions, commonly involving Pele - the goddess of fire.

In some of the volcanic areas of the southwest Pacific region the history of volcanism has not been researched with the same degree of vigor as the anthropological and archaeological studies. The absence of consideration of volcanism in the cultural history and cultural development within the Tongan archipelago appears to be the most acute example. Recent geological studies may pose new solutions or alternatives to the complex changes in power and lineage described for Tonga.