Natural Disasters and Cultural Change

John Grattan, Robin Torrence

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415216968
• eBook ISBN: 9781134604906
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Archäologie

Human cultures have been interacting with natural hazards since the dawn of time. This book explores these interactions in detail and revisits some famous catastrophes including the eruptions of Thera and Vesuvius. These studies demonstrate that diverse human cultures had well-developed strategies which facilitated their response to extreme natural events.

1 The archaeology of disasters: past and future trends

ROBIN TORRENCE AND JOHN GRATTAN

WHY STUDY DISASTERS?

In a landmark book which examined the role of volcanic eruptions in human evolution, Sheets and Grayson (1979: 6) could legitimately note that very few archaeologists had paid significant attention to the potential cultural effects of the natural hazards (e.g. volcanic tephra, earthquake-damaged walls, etc.) whose occurrences were apparent from many of their excavations. The current situation is radically different. In recent years studies stressing the impacts of past natural disasters on ancient societies have increased dramatically, although the majority of these are still authored or inspired by natural scientists and astronomers rather than archaeologists (e.g. Ambrose, 1998; Driessen and Macdonald, 1997; Harris, 2000; Isaacson and Zeidler, 1999; McGuire et al., 2000; McCoy and Heiken, 2000; Newhall et al., 2000; Nur and Cline, 2000; Peiser et al., 1998; Siebe et al., 1996; Stiros and Jones, 1996). Volcanic eruptions have led the way as the most commonly invoked environmental forcing mechanism, but droughts, floods and earthquakes are now also regularly proposed as triggering cultural change.

If we look to the modern world as a model for what we might expect to find in the past, we find that severe climatic events that wreak havoc on human communities, destroy homes and livelihoods, and inflict high levels of mortality are surprisingly frequent and widespread. For instance, Tobin and Montz (1997) provide a graphic catalogue of disasters during the single typical year of 1985.

An earthquake in Mexico killed 20,000 people; a tropical cyclone killed 11,000 in Bangladesh, and one in Vietnam killed 670; 300 died from landslides in the Philippines; a volcano erupted in Colombia killing 25,000; a flood in China added 500 to the death toll; a storm in Algeria killed 26; cold waves were responsible for 290 deaths in India and 145 in the United States; a heat wave killed 103 in the United States; and 52 died in Egypt in a fire.

(Tobin and Montz, 1997: 1)

A detailed study by Glickman et al. (1992) found that between 1945 and 1986, 2.34 million people lost their lives to disasters and that 30 disasters and 56,000 deaths occurred on average per year. Consequently, the study and management of natural hazards has become an important concern for the modern world, which now makes large financial investments in hazard prevention and relief. The United Nations went so far as to declare the 1990s the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR), an action that stimulated and fostered huge programmes for research and for disaster awareness programmes.

Given the importance ascribed to natural disasters in the modern world, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that they were also frequently experienced by past societies. To what extent have severe environmental events had a significant effect on cultural histories? Based on the marked increase in popular and professional archaeological publications on their role in the past (e.g. Keys, 2000; McGuire, 1999; Schoch and Aquinas, 1999), one might assume that disasters have become fairly widely accepted as important agents of cultural change.

We feel it is important to question whether the current popularity of external natural forces in accounting for human evolution and social change in the remote past is simply a product of modern concerns or has identified a genuinely important mechanism for change that has been relatively neglected until recently. The critical issue of correlation (an extreme natural event happened about the same time as the observed cultural change) versus causation (the cultural change was dependent on the environmental event) has rarely been satisfactorily addressed by detailed and systematic research (cf. Sadler and Grattan, 1999; Chapters 6 and 18). Too often archaeologists and earth scientists have simply assumed that the occurrence of extreme natural events means that they were the prime movers in cultural change without demonstrating that the latter was solely or largely dependent on the former.

Consequently, the overall aim of this book is to critically examine the role of extreme environmental events in causing cultural change. The authors have deliberately taken a sceptical point of view and have carefully examined the evidence in order to distinguish between coincidence and dependence. We begin with a programmatic chapter by Shimoyama which proposes an analytical framework and a set of basic concepts that should guide archaeological disaster studies. Examples from Japan are used to illustrate his methodology. This statement about ideal methodology is followed by case studies with broad coverage in both spatial (North and South America, Europe, Asia and the Pacific) and temporal terms (several thousand years ago up to the present day). They also involve a wide sample of different mechanisms (climatic change, volcanoes, tsunamis, floods, earthquakes and a shipwreck) to present detailed assessments of the relationship between specific natural processes and cultural responses. The inclusion of historical and modern studies illustrates that the widest possible research framework is required in order satisfactorily to evaluate the role of human disasters. The modern studies make a particular contribution because they highlight areas of behaviour that archaeologists cannot monitor effectively. For example, Gibbs’s account in Chapter 5 of a shipwreck off the west coast of Australia provides a gripping story of social disintegration following a catastrophe. The detailed reconstruction of the impact of the toxic gases that affected Europe in 1783 (Chapter 6) reminds us that some catastrophic events may not generate certain kinds of data and are therefore ‘invisible’ in archaeological terms. The recent disasters in Papua New Guinea (Chapter 3), the Philippines (Chapter 4) and Japan (Chapter 18) suggest that attachment to land or place may explain why some people do not abandon their homes even when faced with very dangerous and unpleasant conditions. Case studies like these provide explicit models that can help shape future archaeological work and so they form a very important part of this book.

The results presented in the wide-ranging case studies highlight the importance of critical, analytical research to determine how and in what situations natural factors create disastrous conditions for humans and whether these have significant, long-lasting effects. On the scales over which archaeology generally deals, the papers emphasise the flexibility and adaptability of past societies and the importance of the social context in determining the ultimate outcome, a point which has also only recently been accepted in modern disaster research (e.g. Blaikie et al., 1994; Oliver-Smith, 1996; Tobin and Montz, 1997). The many substantive and theoretical issues raised by the papers also demonstrate that archaeological analyses of past disasters have a very important role to play in planning for the future.

THEORETICAL IMPORTANCE OF DISASTERS

Apart from the current popularity of the concept that catastrophes were a powerful agent for cultural change, there are a number of compelling reasons why studying natural disasters is important for archaeological theory and practice. Archaeological theory about the pace and character of cultural change has generally assumed that the process is mainly internally generated, unfolds slowly through time, and inevitably leads to greater socio-cultural complexity and socalled levels of progress. Although environmental determinism has also been quite influential, various forms of the Functionalist or Processualist theories, which dominated archaeological and anthropological thought from the 1970s until recently, stressed homeostatis and equilibrium, properties which are in conflict with the notion of rapid change induced by external factors. Processual archaeologists are unlikely to have envisaged one-off events as having had a major effect over the very long time scales that archaeologists generally study. Despite experiencing a major catastrophe, societies are expected to have picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, and continued on their relentless social evolutionary path to complexity. As a result, scholars focused on what they saw as ‘normal patterns of behaviour’ and ‘had little to say about systems whose normal coping mechanisms failed’ (cf. Torry, 1979: 518, 521). In contrast, disasters are an important subject for study because, as noted by Oliver-Smith (1996: 303), they ‘signal the failure of a society to adapt successfully to certain features of its natural and socially constructed environment in a sustainable fashion’. Since they demonstrate what were the limits of adaptive processes, a focus on how societies respond to disasters would seem to be an important way to understand the general processes of evolution.

Alternatives to social evolutionary thinking which focus on non-linear change, chaos, punctuated change and catastrophism (e.g. studies in van der Leeuw and McGlade 1997) provide a significant challenge to archaeological theory, but have received very little attention to date, although their role within modern studies of natural hazards has been promoted by Bryant (1991: 5–6). Chance events or what Gould (1989) has called ‘historical contingency’ are also beginning to be recognised as key factors within the process of cultural evolution (e.g. Terrell, 1988; Zeidler and Isaacson, in press). We argue that studying the cultural consequences of natural hazards and the disasters they may have caused in the past may suggest a very productive methodology for breaking out of established patterns of thought. Careful studies of past disasters also provide a useful format for testing alternative approaches to cultural change and may perhaps even lead to new ways for conceptualising non-linear processes.

Finally, archaeological research can make a contribution to helping managers cope with contemporary disaster events. From archaeological research we may establish the principal components of a disaster, reconstruct the physical event itself, assess the physical damage it caused, and identify the response strategies of the exposed culture. More importantly, since archaeology operates over a large enough time scale, it can assess the long-term impacts of a disaster that might be overlooked in a modern study. Studies have already shown that long after the world press has moved on, local catastrophes can have profound long-term effects on the lives of the people involved and these have the potential to permeate and eventually alter the society as a whole (cf. Chapters 3, 5 and 12; Mbunwe-Samba, 1999; Grayson and Sheets, 1979: 628; Oliver-Smith, 1986). Furthermore, disasters can accelerate social processes that were in train beforehand (Blong, 1984: 186; Oliver-Smith, 1996: 313; Chapter 14). It is therefore very important to promote research which specifically evaluates the effects of natural disasters over longer time scales than is usually the case in modern disaster studies. Detailed archaeological case studies can make a significant contribution to this goal.

With very few exceptions, disasters were widely ignored until the seeming exponential increase in mortality and damages in the recent past created a new awareness of their potential impacts. The danger, however, is that some scholars have gone too far and are making a simplistic analogy between modern concerns about disasters and potential effects in the past. This has led to the adoption of a dangerously uncritical approach when hypothesising the importance of past extreme environmental events. Although we argue that the role of disasters may have been overlooked, we also stress that their role in causing cultural change must be very carefully evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

CONCEPTS AND DEFINITIONS

Risk management, which entails the study of natural hazards and their social impacts, has become increasingly popular in the last decade due to the boost of the United Nations IDNDR and economic challenges to the insurance industry posed by natural disasters. Until recently there were two separate fields of research. On the one hand, earth scientists studied the physical properties of the volcanoes, earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, etc., aiming to predict their occurrences and likely impacts (e.g. Bryant, 1991; Blong, 1984). On the other, social scientists focused on the short-term consequences of disasters and stressed cultural aspects of communities in determining their vulnerability to natural processes and their methods for coping with stress (e.g. Torry, 1979). Unfortunately, the two fields are still relatively separate and distinct (e.g. compare McGuire, 1999 or Harris, 2000 with Blaikie et al., 1994), although there are signs of major changes and recognition that both aspects need to be better incorporated into disaster research. Archaeological research can gain a great deal from the current debates taking place within the broad field of disaster management. Although Sheets and Grayson (1979: 4–6) reviewed this research in the introduction to their book, it was written before social scientists were heavily involved in disaster research (cf. Torry, 1979) and this is reflected in the emphasis in their text on the natural science approach. Previous archaeological studies of disasters have also mainly been influenced by earth scientists (e.g. McGuire et al., 2000; McCoy and Heiken, 2000). The papers in this book represent a significant change toward a more integrated methodology in which the environmental and social variables are considered to be equally relevant.

Although they may be initiated by natural factors, ‘disasters are social phenomena’ (Shimoyama, Chapter 2). As emphasised by Blaikie et al.,

the ‘natural’ and the ‘human’ are so inextricably bound together in almost all disaster situations, especially when viewed in an enlarged time and space framework, that disasters cannot be understood to be ‘natural’ in any straightforward way.

(Blaikie et al., 1994: 6)

Most scholars agree that the critical ingredient of a disaster is the victims (cf. Chapter 2). Beyond this crucial point the details vary slightly. For example, Tobin and Montz (1997: 6) use 25 deaths as an arbitrary threshold for a disaster. Others require more extensive damage so that ‘all major public and private facilities no longer provide essential social and economic services without extensive replacement or repair’ (Torry, 1979: 518) or that ‘the essential functions of the society are interrupted or destroyed’ (Oliver-Smith, 1996: 305). In other definitions the key factor is the response. For example, a disaster is defined as a situation where ‘recovery is unlikely without external aid’ (Blaikie et al., 1994) or when there is ‘a total breakdown in day-to-day functioning’ and ‘the damage may be so great and so extensive that survivors have nowhere to turn for help’ (Tobin and Montz, 1997: 31). For our purposes the most simple definition – the existence of damage to individuals or their property – is all that is essential to the definition of a disaster. In this conception disasters can be placed along a continuum ranging from those with minimal consequences to others with economic and social losses. For archaeology the most critical point is not whether a disaster took place but whether it caused cultural change.

Unlike most scholars, who consider natural hazards to comprise mainly environmental events, we make a distinction between forcing mechanisms and hazards. The forcing mechanism is defined as the process that initiates the damages. In our scheme the second component of a disaster, the natural hazard, comprises the ‘potential interaction between humans and extreme natural events’ (Tobin and Montz, 1997: 5). In other words, a physical process is not a hazard unless it could potentially impact on a social group. In assessing whether natural processes led to past disasters, the existence and nature of the hazard need to be assessed independently from the occurrence of severe environmental events that have been recorded in the geological record.

The potential initiations or forci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Series editors’ foreword
• Preface
• 1 The archaeology of disasters: past and future trends
• 2 Basic characteristics of disasters
• 3 Tsunamis and the coastal communities of Papua New Guinea
• 4 Bacolor town and Pinatubo volcano, Philippines: coping with recurrent lahar disaster
• 5 Maritime archaeology and behaviour during crisis: the wreck of the VOC ship Batavia (1629)
• 6 ‘The end is nigh’? Social and environmental responses to volcanic gas pollution
• 7 Recurring tremors: the continuing impact of the AD 79 eruption of Mt Vesuvius
• 8 Volcanism and early Maori society in New Zealand
• 9 Under the volcano: Ni-Vanuatu and their environment
• 10 Earthquakes, subsidence, prehistoric site attrition and the archaeological record: a view from the Settlement Point site, Kodiak Archipelago, Alaska
• 11 Natural disasters and cultural change in the Shumagin Islands
• 12 Horsemen of the Apocalypse: the relationship between severe environmental perturbations and culture change on the north coast of Peru
• 13 Climatic change, flooding and occupational hiatus in the lake-dwelling central European Bronze Age
• 14 Towards an archaeology of crisis: defining the long-term impact of the Bronze Age Santorini eruption
• 15 Volcanoes and history: a significant relationship? The case of Santorini
• 16 What makes a disaster? A long-term view of volcanic eruptions and human responses in Papua New Guinea
• 17 The impact of the Kikai-Akahoya explosive eruptions on human societies
• 18 Volcanic disasters and archaeological sites in Southern Kyushu, Japan
• Index