Lake Eacham and nearby maar lakes (Australia)

In northern Queensland (Australia) there are a number of maar lakes about which there are enduring oral traditions, some recently transcribed. Those describing the formation of the maar Lake Eacham (#4 in Table 1), translated and transcribed by linguist Dixon (Reference Dixon1972), include a Dyirbal (Aboriginal) story interpreted as describing the formation of this phreatomagmatic maar:

A minimum ¹⁴C age for the formation of the Lake Eacham maar, the youngest in the area, is 9130 cal yr BP (Whitehead et al., Reference Whitehead, Stephenson, McDougall, Hopkins, Grahams, Collerson and Johnson2007). Other stories likely to recall maar volcanism are known to Aboriginal groups in this area. In 1940, a story describing the creation of Lake Eacham and Lake Barrine was recounted by Emily Russell, a Ngadjon woman, who recalled how ‘violent geological disturbances’, rapidly rising groundwater levels, and earthquakes were witnessed by her distant ancestors. The rising waters ‘swallowed people’, although others escaped (Govor, Reference Govor2000).

Maar lakes, which often remain undisturbed for thousands of years, provide excellent archives of environmental change. In basal sediments from nearby Lake Euramoo, evidence was found of a drier climate in the Early Holocene with sclerophyllous rather than modern rainforest vegetation (Kershaw, Reference Kershaw1970), a finding consistent with Aboriginal traditions of ‘open country’ long ago in this area (Dixon, Reference Dixon1991).

In this example, there is a breadth and depth of oral traditions that might be predicted from the isolated nature of this group of maar volcanoes as well as the seventy millennia or so of isolation that marked Aboriginal occupation of Australia. These factors provide an optimal situation for the repeated intergenerational communication of such traditions (Nunn, Reference Nunn2018).

Hasandağı (Turkey/Türkiye)

The oldest volcanic edifice at Hasandağı (Mt Hasan) in southeast Turkey is of Pliocene age, but experienced several phases of activity/growth, the most recent of Holocene age, which was re-dated to about 8970 cal yr BP (6960 BCE) using (U–Th)/He as part of the study of Schmitt et al. (Reference Schmitt, Danišík, Aydar, Şen, Ulusoy and Lovera2014) (#7 in Table 1). About 130 km southwest of Hasandağı lie the remains of the Neolithic settlement of Çatalhöyük, founded around 9050 cal yr BP (7100 BCE) (Bayliss et al., Reference Bayliss, Brock, Farid, Hodder, Southon and Taylor2015), that include a mural interpreted as depicting an erupting volcano (Figure 3) with a plausible resemblance to Hasandağı (Mellaart, Reference Mellaart1968). The overlap in ages of this volcano's Holocene eruption and that of the creation of the mural support this interpretation (Schmitt et al., Reference Schmitt, Danišík, Aydar, Şen, Ulusoy and Lovera2014).

Figure 3. The twin peaks of the Hasandağı volcano (Turkey) showing (inset) the mural from Shrine VII at Çatalhöyük, 130 km distant, that has been interpreted as depicting the latest eruption of Hasandağı about 8970 cal yr BP (6960 BCE). Main image from Wikimedia Commons (Stephen Mason), inset from Mellaart (Reference Mellaart1968).

Although this eruption of Hasandağı was not visible from Çatalhöyük, it was undoubtedly observed by some of its inhabitants and rendered by the artist on the basis of these observations. Key among the details is the location of the eruption in “the summit region of the taller peak” and “the volcanological interpretation of the painting as showing mild Strombolian activity” (Schmitt et al., Reference Schmitt, Danišík, Aydar, Şen, Ulusoy and Lovera2014, p. 10). Although we know of no parallel oral traditions about this eruption from the published English-language literature, this example shows the importance of visual representations in helping preserve what were undoubtedly once widespread oral traditions recalling this event in this region.

This is consistent with recent ideas that knowledge was communicated orally in pre-literate contexts, often using devices such as poetry and song, dance and performance, but also commonly with the use of visual memory aids such as rock art. Good examples also come from South Africa (Low, Reference Low2014), Norway (Nyland and Stebergløkken, Reference Nyland and Stebergløkken2020), and Australia (McDonald et al., Reference McDonald, Reynen, Ditchfield, Dortch, Leopold, Stephenson, Whitley, Ward and Veth2018; Ramanaidou and Fonteneau, Reference Ramanaidou and Fonteneau2019).

Kinrara (Australia)

Part of the McBride volcanic province in northern Queensland, Australia, the Kinrara Volcano (#9 in Table 1) is today marked by a well-preserved cone rising 30 m above the surrounding plains across which a series of basanite lava flows can be traced as much as 55 km from their source (Cohen et al., Reference Cohen, Mark, Fallon and Stephenson2017). Ages for the most recent eruption, using ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar, suggest this occurred 7000 ± 2000 cal yr BP (3000–7000 BCE).

The Gugu Badhun people, who continue to occupy the Kinrara region, have numerous extant memories of this eruption (Figure 4) and the ways it affected their livelihoods (Hoolihan and Sutton, Reference Hoolihan and Sutton1970; Cadet-James et al., Reference Cadet-James, James, McGinty and McGregor2017). Key among the Gugu Badhun stories are those that recall when ‘the earth caught fire along the watercourses’, interpreted as observations of lavas from Kinrara flowing along surface declivities. Another story interprets the eruption as the action of a ‘witchdoctor’ digging a pit in the ground in which he stirred the ‘dust’ that spread out across the land, making it difficult for people to see where they were and asphyxiating many; ‘people got lost in the dust and died’.

Figure 4. This mural depicts a modern interpretation of the Gugu Badhun creation story, telling of the conflict between Numalnali (bronze-winged pigeon) and Bubunba (pheasant) that resulted in the appearance of Baganbara (Kinrara Volcano) and the associated lava flows, which are at the center of Gugu Badhun territory. This oral tradition speaks of the pheasant's futile pursuit of the faster pigeon which melted rocks forming the lava fields flowing from the Kinrara volcanic edifice. Surrounding the birds is the Rainbow Serpent, a supernatural being said to have emerged from one of the many springs that subsequently appeared from Kinrara's lava flows. ^©Harry Gertz, Shannon Gertz, and Vanessa Gertz; used with permission.

Geoscientific research might indeed conclude that lavas from the Holocene eruption of Kinrara favored existing watercourses, reshaping the drainage and topography of the surrounding landscape, and even creating new freshwater springs (around the termini of the lava flows) that became rich in fauna and flora (James, Reference James2009). But additional details in the Gugu Badhun oral traditions could have come only from eyewitnesses. These include the likelihood that this eruption involved the emission of toxic gases from the crater that spread out across the land and had similar effects to other, more recent and better documented events such as the 1986 Lake Nyos (Cameroon) limnic eruption (Kling et al., Reference Kling, Clark, Compton, Devine, Evans, Humphrey, Koenigsberg, Lockwood, Tuttle and Wagner1987), suggesting that at one stage during the Kinrara eruption a lake formed in the crater. Such details are not only of historical interest but also relevant to future hazard management in the Kinrara area.

Mt Mazama and Crater Lake (USA)

Mount Mazama is the name given to a complex volcano (#11 in Table 1) more than a kilometer tall that once existed in the southern Cascade Range (Oregon, USA). Its terminal eruption, an ultraplinian event, occurred about 7600 cal yr BP (5650 BCE), a modal age derived from Bayesian analysis of 81 ¹⁴C determinations, and resulted in the formation of modern Crater Lake. Eyewitness accounts of this memorable event, which involved the extrusion of more than 100 km³ of lava and clastic material covering some 2,600,000 km² (Bacon and Lanphere, Reference Bacon and Lanphere2006), are the subject of several extant Klamath oral traditions, written down only within the last two hundred years (Deur, Reference Deur2002).

The most widespread Klamath tradition describes how Llao, the demon who once inhabited the volcano, terrorized the people living around it, shaking the land on which they lived and showering them with hot rocks. So, the people sought the help of the benevolent spirit Skell who battled Llao and eventually pulled down the volcano on top of him, a plausible memory of the terminal eruption and collapse of Mt Mazama and the formation of the modern caldera (Crater Lake). The Klamath stories are rich in ancillary detail, such as when Llao ‘spewed fire from his mouth’:

This case study therefore illustrates the additional information that can be acquired through such detailed ‘legends’. For instance, geoscientists can certainly map the extent of large pieces of clastic material, but they cannot easily know how much forest was destroyed during this eruption (Long et al., Reference Long, Power, Minckley and Hass2014). And while the extract above notes some of the responses by local residents to the eruption, one wonders whether some of that inferred since, such as the effects of the eruption of Mt Mazama on the resource base that forced the development of new methods of food preparation (Oetelaar and Beaudoin, Reference Oetelaar and Beaudoin2016), could have been understood far sooner had the Klamath ‘stories’ been treated more seriously and transcribed more assiduously earlier than they were.

Nabukelevu (Fiji)

Part of a volcanic island arc associated with proximal lithospheric plate underthrusting, Kadavu Island in southern Fiji exhibits a progression of active volcanism from northeast to southwest (Verbeeten et al., Reference Verbeeten, Crawford, Eggins, Maillet, Mauk and St George1995). The only active volcano today is Nabukelevu (Mt Washington) (#12 in Table 1), where three eruptive episodes occurred within the past three millennia (Cronin et al., Reference Cronin, Ferland and Terry2004a). This marks the approximate time span of human occupation of the Fiji archipelago so there is an expectation that people would have witnessed these events.

Recent research focused on several traditional communities on the islands of the Kadavu group and identified 13 extant stories about Nabukelevu volcanism (Lancini et al., Reference Lancini, Nunn, Nanuku, Tavola, Bolea, Geraghty and Compatangelo-Soussignan2023), all considered likely to recall the largest event: the dome-forming eruption that occurred more than 2420 ± 90 cal yr BP (470 BCE). Most of these stories recalled how the ‘god’ of Ono Island, finding his view of the sunset obscured by dome formation, ‘flew’ to Nabukelevu to confront the god living there. The two fought, considered a memory of the eruption, then one pursued the other through the sky, dropping ‘soil’ to create islands, the names and formation sequence of which feature in several versions of the story. It is proposed that this sequence is a memory of the movement of the ash cloud across the region. Another detail in some versions explains that one god ‘drank’ up the ocean to reveal the hiding place of his rival, a detail interpreted as a memory of a tsunami.

This case study is instructive in two ways. Firstly, for most of the time that stories about the warring gods on Kadavu was written down, around the mid-nineteenth century, it was treated as a myth (i.e., a made-up culture-defining story with no basis in fact). This interpretation was supported by the assumption that the youngest eruption at Nabukelevu had been tens of thousands of years ago, long before people arrived in Fiji. This assumption was nullified when pottery fragments were discovered in a paleosol beneath several meters of scoria, which led to the ‘myth’ being treated more seriously and eventually being found to be a memory of an eruption at Nabukelevu. Secondly, as the research of Lancini et al. (Reference Lancini, Nunn, Nanuku, Tavola, Bolea, Geraghty and Compatangelo-Soussignan2023) demonstrates, in places where oral traditions continue to be related, it is possible to identify geological details from oral (and recently transcribed) accounts, implying that this would be a worthwhile project in situations similar to that of Nabukelevu.

Memories of other remembered eruptions

In addition to the five case studies detailed above, a further 15 Holocene eruptions, plausibly recalled in extant oral traditions and therefore ‘remembered’, are described more briefly below.

Albano Maar (Italy) (#1 in Table 1) is Europe's deepest lake and has exhibited volcanic activity for at least 5900 years (De Benedetti et al., Reference De Benedetti, Funiciello, Giordano, Diano, Caprilli and Paterne2008), posing a continuing threat to the southern fringes of Rome. In 394 BCE, an aqueduct was built through the crater wall and acted as a spill over for any unexpected rise in maar lake levels, implying that the Roman engineers knew the history of the area, probably through local oral traditions (Nunn et al., Reference Nunn, Lancini, Franks, Compatangelo-Soussignan and McCallum2019).

Also known as Long Island, Arop (Papua New Guinea) (#2 in Table 1) is the site of a VEI-6 eruption that occurred 1651-1671 CE and brought the ‘taim tudak’ (time of darkness) to people across an area of almost 100,000 km², an event well remembered in oral traditions (Blong, Reference Blong1982; Blong et al., Reference Blong, Fallon, Wood, McKee, Chen, Magill and Barter2018).

The location of several Holocene ultraplinian eruptions, Changbaishan (China–North Korea) (#3 in Table 1) is the subject of several Chinese traditions explaining the formation of maars and caldera lakes, hot springs, fire, and flood that plausibly recall its millennium eruption 946–947 CE (Wei et al., Reference Wei, Taniguchi and Liu2002; Zhang et al., Reference Zhang, Smol and Bu2022).

Mount Elbrus (Russia) (#5 in Table 1) is the highest volcano in the Caucasus Mountains. One of its satellite cones, Lesser Tkarsheti (Georgia), erupted around 6500 years ago (4188–4740 BCE) (Bogatikov et al., Reference Bogatikov, Rogozhin, Gurbanov, Marakhanov, Spiridonov, Shevchenko and Burkanov2003; Vashakidze et al., Reference Vashakidze, Goguitchaichvili, García-Redondo, Calvo-Rathert, Carrancho, Cejudo, Morales, Lebedev and Gabarashvili2019). Given that people lived throughout this area at this time (Golovanova et al., Reference Golovanova, Doronichev, Doronicheva, Tregub, Volkov, Spasovskiy, Petrov, Maksimov and Nedomolkin2020), it has been proposed that this lava-dominated event helped inform the basis of the Greek classical myth of Prometheus and his punishment by Zeus for stealing fire from the gods and gifting this to humanity (Barber and Barber, Reference Barber and Barber2004).

Maar formation at Mount Gambier (#6 in Table 1), in the Newer Volcanics Province of South Australia, occurred around 5450 cal yr BP and is one of the most recent eruptions in Australia. Two groups of Aboriginal stories likely refer to this event. One references ‘a growling old man’ living at Mount Gambier who periodically ‘threw fire into the sky’ (Wilkie et al., Reference Wilkie, Cahir and Clark2020). The other is the story of a family of giants that settled here, having fled eruptions at other volcanoes in the area, until one day water rose up in the maar and flooded their cooking ovens, forcing them to move again (Smith, Reference Smith1880), which has been interpreted as a memory of maar development (Nunn et al., Reference Nunn, Lancini, Franks, Compatangelo-Soussignan and McCallum2019).

The first inhabitants of Iceland arrived 870–930 CE and missed the massive subglacial eruption 822–823 CE of Katla (Büntgen et al., Reference Büntgen, Eggertsson, Wacker, Sigl, Ljungqvist, Di Cosmo and Plunkett2017) (#8 in Table 1), yet soon developed oral traditions about its subsequent activity, especially the lava, pyroclastic flows, and the associated flooding that affected nearby communities (Einarsson, Reference Einarsson2019).

The volcanic edifice of Mauna Loa (USA) (#10 in Table 1) dominates the island of Hawai'i and, together with its more active flank volcano Kilauea, is the subject of many Hawaiian stories (Westervelt, Reference Westervelt1916; Coombs et al., Reference Coombs, Eakins and Cervelli2006). Many recall the activities of the deity, Pele, who is said to have made her home on Kilauea and to have been responsible for its activity for most of the ca. 800 years that people have lived in the Hawaii group (Rieth et al., Reference Rieth, Hunt, Lipo and Wilmshurst2011). The various Pele stories show such a close correlation with last-millennium volcanic chronology that there is little doubt they encode eyewitness accounts of various events (Swanson, Reference Swanson2008).

The partly submerged caldera of Santorini or Thera (Greece) (#13 in Table 1) is one of several islands that remain after the ultraplinian eruption here around 3500 cal yr BP (1562–1538 BCE) (Pearson et al., Reference Pearson, Sbonias, Tzachili and Heaton2023), which likely contributed to the collapse of the Minoan civilization (Driessen and MacDonald, Reference Driessen and MacDonald1997) and had such an effect further afield that monuments such as the Tempest Stele in Egypt (Ritner and Moeller, Reference Ritner and Moeller2014) were erected to complement the telling of oral traditions. Oral traditions preserve memories of the eruption of Santorini, recorded in Hesiod's Theogony as a clash between the god Zeus and the Titans (Greene, Reference Greene1992) and plausibly also in the Book of Exodus in the Christian Bible (Periáñez and Abril, Reference Periáñez and Abril2014).

One of a group of active volcanoes in northern Kamchatka (Ozerov et al., Reference Ozerov, Girina, Zharinov, Belousov and Demyanchuk2020), Sheveluch (Russia) (#14 in Table 1), is also the subject of several Itelmen oral histories that report how it has moved around the landscape (Degai, Reference Degai2009), something interpreted as observations of the shift of the center of eruptive activity over possibly several hundred years or more. One set of Itelmen stories recalls that the Kronotskoe Lake was the original location of the volcano but that, after it rose and wandered off in search of a better resting place, both Kainach and Kul'hkolyangin lakes formed in its footprints (Russian sources quoted in Degai, Reference Degai2009, p 40).

One of the most active volcanoes in western Java (Indonesia), Tangkuban Parahu (#15 in Table 1), erupted several times during the Holocene, but there are Sundanese stories that likely explain its memorable phreatic eruptive activity 9445–9980 cal yr BP, which is remembered as a consequence of a folk hero named Sangkuriang kicking over a boat he had built and creating a dome/mountain (Vitaliano, Reference Vitaliano1973; Kartadinata et al., Reference Kartadinata, Okuno, Nakamura and Kobayashi2002).

Located in the west of North Island (New Zealand), Mount Taranaki (#16 in Table 1) is a stratovolcano that erupted frequently during the Holocene, including the ca. 700 years of human occupation of New Zealand (Hogg et al., Reference Hogg, Higham, Lowe, Palmer, Reimer and Newnham2003; Cronin et al., Reference Cronin, Zernack, Ukstins, Turner, Torres-Orozco, Stewart, Smith, Procter, Price and Platz2021). The most recent confirmed eruption occurred 1790 CE (Cronin et al., Reference Cronin, Zernack, Ukstins, Turner, Torres-Orozco, Stewart, Smith, Procter, Price and Platz2021) and may be recalled in Māori oral traditions of a battle between the giants (volcanoes) Taranaki and Tongariro for the love of Pihanga, which were recorded in writing by early European (Pākehā) settlers (Ngāwhare-Pounamu, Reference Ngāwhare-Pounamu2014).

The Tengchong volcanic field in southwest China (#17 in Table 1) exhibited explosive activity from at least three centers during the Holocene (Li et al., Reference Li, Zhao, Zhang and Wang2020). Many of these centers were identified from local informants, exemplifying “a custom in some Chinese geological survey work that geologists look for stories or tales from natives” (Chen and Zheng, Reference Chen, Zheng, Xu, Oppenheimer, Hammond and Wei2021, p. 283). These researchers give the example of local stories about how Tengchong used to be a ‘sea of water’ but then the goddess Nuwa threw three of her giant sewing needles into it, allowing land to grow and volcanoes to form.

The active volcano of Tungurahua (Ecuador) (#18 in Table 1) comprises three volcanic edifices, the youngest of which began forming around 2300 cal yr BP, since which time it has exhibited eruptive episodes every century or so (Hall et al., Reference Hall, Robin, Beate, Mothes and Monzier1999). Since Spanish arrival in the area in 1533 CE, there has been documentary evidence of these but observations of the eruption that occurred about 623 ± 13 cal yr BP, around 200 years earlier, were well established in the traditions of the Puruhás Indians living in the area at the time of contact (Le Pennec et al., Reference Le Pennec, Jaya, Samaniego, Ramón, Yánez, Egred and van der Plicht2008). Earlier massive eruptions such as the VEI 5 event of 2990 cal yr BP plausibly could be the earliest inspirations of such traditions. Memories of the activity of Tungurahua are also implicit in the story reporting the beliefs of local residents that this volcano was the wife of Chimborazo Volcano, 40 km to the west, and that the two had occasional intercourse with eruptive consequences (Bandelier, Reference Bandelier1906).

The basaltic-andesitic stratovolcano Villarrica (Chile) (#19 in Table 1) has been active throughout the Holocene and remains so today (Costantini et al., Reference Costantini, Pioli, Bonadonna, Clavero and Longchamp2011). The Mapuche people have stories about the spirits trapped in a cave (reñü) within this volcano who periodically harm Mapuche livelihoods through (eruption-associated?) floods and drought, something preventable by an annual ‘ñillatun’ ceremony (Faron, Reference Faron1964).

The Alaskan volcano of Wrangell (USA) (#20 in Table 1), erupted in 1147 and 1830 cal yr BP, in both instances spreading ash across a vast area and forcing the migrations of Athabascan peoples who encoded stories of these eruptions in their oral traditions, typically using a metaphor of the kidnap of ‘prize women’ to recall their conflicts that arose from migration into others’ territory (Fast, Reference Fast2008; Mullen, Reference Mullen2012). They also have stories of how their migrations led them to mountains that subsequently ‘melted’, sparking a fire that spread across the land (‘Dogrib Tale’ in Fast, Reference Fast2008), and to places where a mountain ‘surged up in front of them’ before destroying itself and becoming ‘a vast plain’ (‘Hare Tale’ in Fast, Reference Fast2008).

Cerro Blanco (Argentina)

The caldera-forming eruption at Cerro Blanco (Argentina) (#22 in Table 2), about 4200 cal yr BP, was possibly one of the largest on Earth during the Holocene, producing more than 110 km³ of eruptive products, those most voluminous locally being pyroclastic flows (Báez et al., Reference Báez, Bustos, Chiodi, Reckziegel, Arnosio, de Silva, Giordano, Viramonte, Sampietro-Vattuone and Peña-Monné2020). The magnitude of this eruption and the profundity of the changes it wrought to the surrounding landscape may have obliterated its human population, which at the time was low density and dominated by hunter-gatherers, thereby perhaps explaining why no memories of it are found in later oral traditions. A comparable situation has been invoked for the depopulation of the prehistoric population of La Payunia District, which was affected by volcanism earlier in the Holocene (Durán et al., Reference Durán, Mikkan, Barberena, Giesso, Lucero and Ugalde2017).

Yet the possibility of there being formally unrecorded memories of this event remains because areas peripheral to those most affected by the eruption were occupied both before and after it. For example, the Abra del Toro rock shelter, 177 km to the east of Cerro Blanco, was occupied by hunter-gatherers both before and after this eruption, which blanketed the site with a 1-m-thick ash layer (Carbonelli et al., Reference Carbonelli, Fernandez-Turiel and de Medina2022). It may have been the return several years post-eruption of the herds of camelids, attracted by the new growth of vegas pasture, that saw the return of humans to the area (the post-eruption sediment fill of this rock shelter contains an abundance of camelid scapulae). As argued for comparable sites (Torrence, Reference Torrence2016), the location of this rock shelter may have been preserved in oral traditions, enabling it to be found once more. This suggests that such traditions were an essential part of people's culture at this time, implying that memories of the Cerro Blanco caldera-forming eruption may have become ‘lost’ only comparatively recently.

Kikai-Akahoya (Japan)

The caldera-forming super-eruption named Kikai-Akahoya (Japan) (#30 in Table 2) occurred 7300 cal yr BP on the ocean floor 50 km south of Kyushu Island and produced 70–80 km³ of magma, making it one of the largest of all Holocene eruptions (Hamada et al., Reference Hamada, Hanyu, McIntosh, Tejada, Chang, Kaneko and Kimura2023). Pyroclastic flows and tsunamis ran across the land in several places while ash was deposited as far as 1000 km away throughout most of the Japanese archipelago. There is evidence that these phenomena reduced food availability for Jomon hunter-gatherers and forced the migration of affected groups, leading to the emergence of new cultural traits that came to define the early Jomon period. While largely conjectural, it is possible that the apparent absence of extant oral traditions of this eruption is attributable to human mobility, namely the focus of displaced populations on reconfiguring their livelihoods in unfamiliar environments rather than on remembering what had happened to those they had left; an example of people moving from western to eastern Tokai in the aftermath of the eruption was discussed by Ikeya (Reference Ikeya2017).

About 70 km from the center of the Kikai-Akahoya caldera, Tanegashima Island was one of the worst affected areas and, to judge from the absence of continuity of the distinctive Nishinosono pottery tradition there, had its population wholly obliterated (Uchiyama et al., Reference Uchiyama, Kuwahata, Kowaki, Kamijo, Talipova, Gibbs, Jordan and Isaksson2023). There followed ‘several centuries’ before a series of small ephemeral settlements were re-established on Tanegashima Island. These were probably focused on marine-food acquisition because they lack many arrowheads, interpreted as an absence of terrestrial animals to hunt, which is a contrast to the island's pre-eruption occupation. The absence of oral traditions about the eruption on Tanegashima (and in similar places) may therefore be due to the comprehensive depopulation of the island during the eruption and its resettlement much later by groups of people with no knowledge about it.

Taal Caldera (Philippines)

Numerous eruptions from Taal Volcano on Luzon Island in the Philippines have been recorded since at least 1562 CE (Delos Reyes et al., Reference Delos Reyes, Bornas, Dominey-Howes, Pidlaoan, Magill and Solidum2018), but no traditions are known about the formation of the caldera from which this volcano rises. Taal Caldera (#35 in Table 2) is estimated to have formed during the Middle Holocene, between 5310 and 6910 cal yr BP, and to have been marked by the extrusion of 50 km³ of basalt–andesite scoria (Martinez and Williams, Reference Martinez and Williams1999). That people were living on Luzon Island at the time of this memorable caldera-forming eruption is indisputable, so the absence of extant oral traditions (which must have once existed) is best explained by the cultural syncretism, driven by in-migration from adjoining lands, that characterizes the Late Holocene human history of the Philippines (Miranda et al., Reference Miranda, Sugimoto, Paraguison, Takasaka, Zheng and Yogo2003). Cultural mixing of this kind generally leads to the loss of pre-existing place-based stories as the people who developed them are either displaced or have their traditions intercalated with those of new sets of migrants.

Toomba (Australia)

While there are many Aboriginal stories of volcanic eruptions within the ca. 70,000 years of human settlement in Australia, most of these recall Holocene activity (Wilkie et al., Reference Wilkie, Cahir and Clark2020). Of the Holocene volcanoes for which no such stories are known, that of Toomba in northern Queensland (#36 in Table 2) is a conspicuous example, not least because stories are known for the separate volcanic center of Kinrara (see above), 180 km northwest, which last erupted 7000 ± 2000 cal yr BP (Cohen et al., Reference Cohen, Mark, Fallon and Stephenson2017). The same authors estimated the age of the youngest eruption at Toomba as being 21,000 ± 3000 cal yr BP, meaning that any associated oral traditions may not have survived because they occur beyond ‘the edge of memory’ (Nunn, Reference Nunn2018). That said, it has been suggested that Aboriginal memories may exist of an eruption in southern Australia more than 30,000 cal yr BP (Matchan et al., Reference Matchan, Phillips, Jourdan and Oostingh2020). People are likely to have been living in the Toomba area at the time of its last eruption, so the absence of surviving oral traditions might also be due to a lack of cultural continuity.

Ulmener (Germany)

Modern humans occupied the area of West Eifel in modern Germany long before the last glacial maximum and would have witnessed a number of maar-forming eruptions subsequently, including that around 11,000 cal yr BP, which formed Ulmener Maar (#37 in Table 2) and the youngest in the region (Sirocko et al., Reference Sirocko, Dietrich, Veres, Grootes, Schaber-Mohr, Seelos and Nadeau2013). Although other culturally grounded stories are known from here, none that might conceivably reference maar formation is known. While this may be because the memorable events lie beyond ‘the edge of memory’ (see Toomba above), few deep-time stories exist from this part of Europe, probably because it experienced regular cultural turnover, associated with the loss of place-linked stories, during the last few millennia, unlike its Celtic fringes, for instance (Nunn et al., Reference Nunn, Creach, Gehrels, Bradley, Armit, Stephan, Sturt and Baltzer2021).

Other forgotten eruptions

In addition to the five case studies detailed above, a further 15 Holocene eruptions, considered memorable and yet not the subject of any known oral traditions, are deemed ‘forgotten’ and are described more briefly below.

Anjouan Island volcano (Comoros) (#21 in Table 2), in the western Indian Ocean, about equidistant between the island of Madagascar and the African mainland, exhibited volcano activity on at least three occasions within the Holocene. Strombolian activity occurred ca. 9300 cal yr BP (7513–7089 BCE) in the upper Pomoni Valley with a more recent eruption “in the central part of Anjouan during the last thousand years” (Quidelleur et al., Reference Quidelleur, Michon, Famin, Geffray, Danisík, Gardiner, Rusquet and Zakaria2022, p. 9), well within the period of known human settlement of the island (Crowther et al., Reference Crowther, Lucas, Helm, Horton, Shipton, Wright and Walshaw2016). No (oral) accounts of this volcanic activity from within or beyond the Comoros are known.

The Columba Volcano within the Calatrava Volcanic Field (Spain) (#23 in Table 2) erupted spectacularly during the postglacial period (13,500–6270 cal yr BP), damming the Jabalón River and creating a sizeable lagoon/wetland for several thousand years (Piedrabuena et al., Reference Piedrabuena, Molist, Bergua and Alfonso2019). People had occupied the area throughout this time but no stories about this event appear to have survived, plausibly because of subsequent cultural turnover.

Holocene volcanism at Dotsero (Colorado, USA) (#24 in Table 2), “…began with effusive activity, transitioned to maar-forming phreatomagmatic explosions, and then ended with a violent Strombolian phase” about 4150 cal yr BP (Sweeney et al., Reference Sweeney, Grosso and Valentine2018, p. 78). While the popular idea that the name Dotsero means ‘something new’ in the Ute language can be traced to a 1934 newspaper article (The Steamboat Pilot, June 8), this seems unauthenticated and not part of any more detailed traditions.

Holocene eruptions have characterized the Harrat Al-Madinah volcanic field in Saudi Arabia (#25 in Table 2). While the two youngest eruptions, 641 CE and 1256 CE, are described in historical records, the ‘post-Neolithic’ eruptions (Qm6 in Moufti et al., Reference Moufti, Moghazi and Ali2013) that produced thick lava flows in the area, which would have affected local peoples, do not appear to feature in extant oral traditions.

Although several authors claim that volcanism at the Itasy Volcanic Field (Madagascar) (#26 in Table 2) lasted from Pliocene to Holocene times, a robust geochronology is currently lacking (Melluso et al., Reference Melluso, Tucker, Cucciniello, le Roex, Morra, Zanetti and Rakotoson2018). Yet given that Madagascar was occupied for the entire Holocene (Hansford et al., Reference Hansford, Wright, Rasoamiaramanana, Pérez, Godfrey, Errickson, Thompson and Turvey2018), it is reasonable to suppose some of the most recent events were witnessed by people and may remain in oral traditions that have not been transcribed.

The circular volcanic massif of Jebel Marra (Sudan) (#27 in Table 2) is the highest point in the country, which is why it has a comparatively lush vegetation and plentiful water, attractive for human settlement, compared to the surrounding desert. Increased mobility of the region's inhabitants, particularly within the last few hundred years, may explain the absence of surviving traditions about volcanism, especially the formation of the Deriba Caldera 3500 cal yr BP (Rouwet et al., Reference Rouwet, Németh, Tamburello and Calabrese2021).

Located within southern Siberia, the Jom–Bolok basalt field (Russia) (#28 in Table 2) was active throughout the latest Pleistocene and Holocene, with the largest eruptions occurring within the period 1600–800 cal yr BP (Shchetnikov et al., Reference Shchetnikov, Bezrukova and Krivonogov2019). Just a few hundred kilometers west of Lake Baikal, where there is abundant evidence for Holocene human settlement (Losey et al., Reference Losey, Nomokonova and Savel'ev2016), it seems likely that people would have witnessed the activity of Jom-Bolok even though no extant accounts are known.

The latest eruptions of the Khorgo Volcano (Mongolia) (#29 in Table 2) occurred 8780–7710 cal yr BP (Chuvashova et al., Reference Chuvashova, Rasskazov, Yasnygina, Saranina and Fefelov2007) and were dominated by lava flows that dammed the Suman River valley to create the Terkhiin–Tsagaan Lake (Enkhbold et al., Reference Enkhbold, Khukhuudei, Kusky, Chun, Yadamsuren, Ganbold and Gerelmaa2022). Despite the major landscape changes resulting from these events, there seem to be no extant memories of these eruptions, perhaps because the people who occupied the area during the Early Holocene were nomadic and did not retain place-based memories as long as their sedentary counterparts.

The violent Strombolian Holocene eruption of the La Vache and Lassolas scoria cones (#31 in Table 2), within the Chaine des Puys (France), around 8600 cal yr BP (Jordan et al., Reference Jordan, Le Pennec, Gurioli, Roche and Boivin2016), does not appear to feature in cultural traditions, possibly because those people who observed the eruption were later supplanted by other inhabitants.

In the Caribbean, eruptions occurred at Morne Patates (Dominica) (#32 in Table 2) on at least three occasions during the Late Holocene, approximately 2380 cal yr BP, 1560 cal yr BP, and 685 cal yr BP (Lindsay et al., Reference Lindsay, Stasiuk and Shepherd2003). These events are probably all later than the time of known human arrival on Dominica, 2470–2340 cal yr BP (520–390 BCE) at Delices (Shearn, Reference Shearn2018) but are not known to feature in any extant pre-Columbian traditions, perhaps because of the overprint of later arrivals.

Still having a potential to erupt again, the last eruption of Mt Popa (Myanmar) (#33 in Table 2) included collapse of the volcanic edifice about 8000 cal yr BP and associated pyroclastic flows and ash deposition (Belousov et al., Reference Belousov, Belousova, Zaw, Streck, Bindeman, Meffre and Vasconcelos2018). It is likely that memories of this eruption remained in oral traditions here for a long time, although none appear to be remembered today, because stories about a more recent earthquake event (2392 cal yr BP [442 BCE]) have been recorded (Bell, Reference Bell1907).

Voluminous ash-producing eruptions occurred on Raoul Island in the Kermadec group (New Zealand) (#34 in Table 2) within the period 1650–1800 CE (Worthington et al., Reference Worthington, Gregory and Bondarenko1999; Bourne et al., Reference Bourne, Sear, Langdon and Cronin2023), a time when Māori voyagers were travelling between New Zealand and the islands of central Polynesia. For this reason, it might be expected that stories about these and other eruptions (see Nunn, Reference Nunn2003) would be part of the impressive body of Māori oral traditions, but this appears not to be the case.

The Alaskan volcano of Veniaminof (USA) (#38 in Table 2) has been active repeatedly in historical times, particularly the past hundred years, but the sizes of these events are dwarfed by the colossal caldera-forming eruption about 4100–3900 cal yr BP (Miller and Smith, Reference Miller and Smith1987) that changed the shape of the Alaskan Peninsula and the lives of its inhabitants (Barton et al., Reference Barton, Shirar and Jordan2018). While numerous oral traditions have been recorded for this region, none appear to refer specifically to this eruption, possibly because the memories of it became conflated with observations of younger eruptions.

A similar reason may explain why extant memories of the eruptions of Vesuvius (Italy) (#39 in Table 2) focus on the famed event 1871 cal yr BP (79 CE) that entombed Pompeii and Herculaneum and its successors rather than the earlier and more powerful Plinian eruption, the Pomici di Avellino event, 3945 cal yr BP (1995 BCE) (Sevink et al., Reference Sevink, van Bergen, van der Plicht, Feiken, Anastasia and Huizinga2011), in which “…the pyroclastic density currents generated during the final phreatomagmatic phase are among the most widespread and voluminous in the entire history of the volcano” (Sulpizio et al., Reference Sulpizio, Cioni, Di Vito, Mele, Bonasia and Dellino2010, p. 539). The burial of a pre-eruption village (Di Vito et al., Reference Di Vito, Zanella, Gurioli, Lanza, Sulpizio, Bishop, Tema, Boenzi and Laforgia2009), the existence of human footprints created during eruptive pauses (Mastrolorenzo et al., Reference Mastrolorenzo, Petrone, Pappalardo and Sheridan2006), and the post-eruption establishment of a Bronze Age village (Croce del Papa) all demonstrate that humans witnessed this eruption even though no oral memories of it are known to have survived (Passariello et al., Reference Passariello, Livadie, Talamo, Lubritto, D'Onofrio and Terrasi2009).

The Wendo Koshe volcano (#40 in Table 2) rises from within the Corbetti Caldera in southern Ethiopia. The modern volcano formed during a Plinian eruption around 2346 cal yr BP that spread pumice lapilli across an area exceeding 1000 km² (Rapprich et al., Reference Rapprich, Zácek, Verner, Erban, Goslar, Bekele, Legesa, Hroch and Hejtmánková2016), an event that would have been witnessed by people who would have incorporated their observations in oral traditions, none of which appear to be known today. This situation contrasts with that in northern Ethiopia where written records chronicle eruptions dating from the fifth century CE.