In June this year, CALDERA, the new Nordic-Japan research programme on “Catastrophe Archaeology” was awarded Antiquity’s Ben Cullen Prize 2024 for its opening pilot-study of human responses to the Holocene’s largest ever volcanic eruption. The Kikai-Akahoya (K-Ah) “super-eruption” devastated large areas of Northeast Asia 7,300 years ago, damaging ecosystems for many centuries, even millennia. As Junzo Uchiyama, Professor of Archaeology at Kanazawa University, and Japanese research leader explains:

“This was a massive underwater eruption that exploded out of the seabed just off Kyushu Island in Southwest Japan, triggering powerful earthquakes, tsunamis of up to 30 meters, and super-heated pyroclastic gas flows, which swept in from the sea and onto the land, burning off the rich sub-tropical vegetation and destroying everything in its path. This was followed by heavy ash falls that smothered the hilly landscapes, creating a distinctive “disaster horizon” that survives as a thick tephra layer. This ash layer is still visible across Kyushu; archaeologists encounter it everywhere they excavate – it is a persistent reminder that ancient people and their fragile communities must have suffered terribly”.

Peter Jordan, Professor of World Archaeology at Lund University, leads the Nordic collaborations, and adds that:

“In general, the K-Ah disaster has traditionally been viewed among Japanese scientists as a geological phenomenon, leaving many gaps in our understanding of the precise societal consequences”

The true scale of the K-Ah disaster was first discovered by geologists in the 1970’s. Initially, Japanese archaeologists used the thick K-Ah ash layer to propose a kind of “apocalypse model”, which envisaged abrupt and catastrophic termination of the thriving Jomon foragers who established some of the world’s earliest villages at sites like Uenohara, long before any transition to farming. According to this scenario, Kyushu was far more innovative, advanced and densely settled than all other parts of Japan during the early Holocene. After the disaster, the main locus of developments was displaced to Eastern Japan, which achieved even higher levels of cultural complexity during the peak of the extended Jomon foraging tradition. In contrast, the wastelands of Kyushu suffered a long cultural hiatus before populations from outside moved in and brought entirely new cultural traditions, though the region never regained its earlier cultural dynamism.

But new insights were slowly starting to emerge. Junzo Uchiyama describes that:

“In the last few years, a fundamentally different archaeological scenario has started to emerge, thanks to meticulous work by project member Mitsuhiro Kuwahata and colleagues on Kyushu’s high-resolution pottery sequences. This work demonstrates that small populations managed to survive in a few protected pockets, even in areas quite close to the epicentre”

Rather than highlighting devastation and loss, the CALDERA team were particularly intrigued with how these groups survived, adjusted and found new ways to adapt to the post-disaster landscapes. Addressing this issue led to the launching of the CALDERA Nordic-Japan research programme in 2021, right in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, when international travel was impossible, and many people wondered whether communities and social networks would ever recover. Peter Jordan explains that:

“Our first paper – the one which won the Ben Cullen Prize 2024 – was based on new data that we happened to have available at the time. It looked at how the K-Ah disaster devastated Tanegashima Island, located just off the main island of Kyushu. People here perished but the island was eventually re-settled from the mainland after several centuries, although the new populations had to make major adjustments to subsistence due to lingering damage to the island’s ecosystems. This paper gave us an opportunity to develop the research design for a much bigger project, where the main focus would be on the surviving groups.”

In the last two years the CALDERA team have been developing many new lines of research, supported by two Swedish National Research Infrastructures. Biomolecular analysis of food residues on the distinctive Nishinosono “survivors” pottery tradition, which started prior to K-Ah, and persisted within a handful of small refugia right through the disaster, and into the aftermath, is generating insights into ancient cooking traditions, and whether there was continuity or major adjustments as people scavenged resources and tried to survive in the bleak volcanic wastelands. This work is supported by ARCHLAB, and is conducted at Stockholm University by Dr. Aripekka Junno, who holds a Swedish Research Council Postdoc, plus Professor Sven Isaksson and Professor Kerstin Lidén. CALDERA have also teamed up with InfraVis to develop multi-scalar digital simulations of the K-Ah disaster and its aftermath. “During fieldwork in Kyushu in 2023 we realised just how complex the topography and coastal geography was”, explains Peter Jordan, “Some areas would have been exposed to the full force of tsunamis and the devastating pyroclastic flows, other topographic pockets were protected and here people survived”. 

Another angle that CALDERA want to explore is the widespread assumption that societies and cultures are somehow in stasis prior to shocks and catastrophes, and that after such events they either vanish or exhibit “resilience” and return to a previous normality. As Junzo Uchiyama explains:

“We are finishing another new paper that explores what was happening in the centuries and millennia prior to the K-Ah disaster. Contrary to the old model, the volcanic disaster did not terminate the large Jomon villages. These had already vanished some centuries before K-Ah. In fact, there were repeated shifts – regular cycles – between large villages and more mobile lifeways and most shifts appear to correlate with so-called Bond Events, including the abrupt 8.2 kiloyear cooling interval, which damaged forested ecosystems across East Asia. It is probably better to envisage K-Ah as hitting a “moving target” rather than impacting static cultural formations. This is quite fascinating: by chance K-Ah impacted communities that were flexible and already highly mobile; this factor may have increased opportunities for survival”

As Peter Jordan concludes:

“We have a lot of momentum now, but much important work remains to be done before we fully understand the complex multi-faceted legacies of this volcanic “super-eruption” on longer-term cultural trajectories”.

CALDERA Website: https://portal.research.lu.se/en/projects/caldera-nordic-japan-research-programme-disaster-studies

Disaster, survival and recovery: the resettlement of Tanegashima Island following the Kikai-Akahoya ‘super-eruption’, 7.3ka cal BP by Junzo Uchiyama, Mitsuhiro Kuwahata, Yukino Kowaki, Nobuhiko Kamijō, Julia Talipova, Kevin Gibbs, Peter D. Jordan and Sven Isaksson is out now, open access, in Antiquity.