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Abstract
While volcanologists are experienced in assessing present and past volcanism, and while archaeologists are experts in understanding past societies, the study of how ancient volcanic activity has impacted contemporaneous communities remains little systematised. We here present a fuzzy logic-based methodology for bringing together expert assessments in evaluating the vulnerability and, by extension, the resilience of a group of late Pleistocene foragers to the Laacher See eruption, a large explosive eruption that affected continental Europe 13,000 years ago. Based on attributes assessing human health, shelter, food supply, and water supply our analyses suggest community resilience falls from 1.0 to 0.75 – 0.8 under a 5 cm tephra fall, to 0.45 – 0.50 with a 10 cm fall, and to 0.17 – 0.2 with an 18 – 20 cm tephra fall. Our explicit assessment of different experts’ evaluation of the different attribute’s relative importance facilitates a rigour in formulating such impact scenarios. The assessment methodology is rapid and can then be matched against existing evidence or, importantly, be used to also assess contemporary communities’ potential for loss under different tephra fall conditions. The methodology can be readily transferred between case studies and, in principle, between hazards, and could contribute significantly to the design of realistic disaster scenarios, which in turn serve to build resilience in at-risk communities.
Highlights
A large literature attributes demise or other change in cultural trajectories to the impact of a disaster
We propose a methodology that provides a semi-quantitative test of the impact of a specific volcanic hazard, tephra fall, on a culture and way of life by (a) setting the resilience of the culture pre-impact, (b) estimating the impact of the disaster/extreme event by approximating values for the key attributes postimpact using fuzzy logic and weighted assessments of attribute vulnerability to varying thicknesses of tephra fall
We focus on the effects of airfall tephra; whether volcanic gases were important at mid-distances from the vent is unknown, and it is unclear whether subsequent climatic effects were related to the Laacher See tephra (LST) eruption
Summary
A large literature attributes demise or other change in cultural trajectories to the impact of a disaster. 38,000 years ago [d’Errico and Banks 2015], to the wide-ranging impacts of the Thera eruption 3,600 years ago on Mediterranean societies [Risch and Meller 2013], to the cultural, political and demographic upheavals of the 6th century AD in Europe and elsewhere [Büntgen et al 2016], and even to the Medieval period [McCormick et al 2007] These are merely selected examples from a wide palette of instances where past volcanic eruptions may have affected communities far and near [Sheets and Grayson 1979; Grattan and Torrence 2007; Grattan and Torrence 2003; Felgentreff and Glade 2008; Oppenheimer 2011; Cooper and Sheets 2012; Riede 2015]. We see this methodology as an adjunct to the Realistic Disaster Scenario (RDS) approach [Davies et al 2015] to evaluating the likely consequences of the impact of a natural hazard
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