Abstract
The Italian seismic compilations are among the most complete and back-in time extended worldwide, with earthquakes on record even before the Common Era. However, we have surely lost the memory of dozen strong events of the historical period, mostly in the first millennium CE. Given the lack of certain or conclusive written sources, besides paleoseismological investigations, a complementary way to infer the occurrence of lost earthquakes is to cross-check archaeoseismic evidence from ancient settlements. This usually happens by investigating collapses/restorations/reconstructions of buildings, the general re-organization of the urban texture, or even the abrupt abandonment of the settlement. Exceptionally, epigraphs mentioning more or less explicitly the effects of the earthquake strengthened the field working hypothesis. Here, I deal with both paleoseismological clues from the Monte Marzano Fault System (the structure responsible for the catastrophic, Mw 6.9 1980 earthquake) and archaeoseismological evidence of settlements founded in its surroundings to cast light on two poorly known earthquakes that occurred at the onset and at the end of the first millennium CE, likely in 62 and in 989 CE. Both should share the same seismogenic structure and the size of the 1980 event (Mw 6.9).
Highlights
As widely demonstrated by several works, the Irpinia fault—which is the popular name of theMonte Marzano Fault System (MMFS, [1])—was responsible in November 1980 for a devastating earthquake (Mw 6.9), which was accompanied by the longest surface faulting ever observed in Italy (>30 km), at least before the recent central Apennines event (October 2016, Mw 6.6).Early paleoseismological studies [2] claimed that the recurrence time for 1980-like characteristic earthquakes during the Holocene was approximately 2 kyr, which is a value clashing with both the frequent destructive seismicity of the area affected by the fault [3] and the high GPS-derived strain rate of the region
I deal with both paleoseismological clues from the Monte Marzano Fault System and archaeoseismological evidence of settlements founded in its surroundings to cast light on two poorly known earthquakes that occurred at the onset and at the end of the first millennium CE, likely in 62 and in 989 CE
The unraveling of this tangled skein of construction/destruction events is a very hard task, with the guide and help of the archaeologists, it has been possible to collect several indications from different sectors of the towns that suggest the occurrence of different earthquakes striking Volcei/Buccino and Compsa/Conza in the past, and in particular, one in the 1st century CE and one in the 10th century, i.e., the 989 earthquake
Summary
As widely demonstrated by several works, the Irpinia fault—which is the popular name of the. Paleoseismological studies [2] claimed that the recurrence time for 1980-like characteristic earthquakes during the Holocene was approximately 2 kyr, which is a value clashing with both the frequent destructive seismicity of the area affected by the fault [3] and the high GPS-derived strain rate of the region (at least 2.9 mm/year [4,5]). This inconsistency was fixed through high-precision topographic leveling run across the compound fault scarp [6], and new paleoseismological trenches and pits opened on different fault segments of the 43 km long MMFS [7].
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