Surviving in the Ashes: A Preliminary Assessment of Socio-Ecological Responses to a "Super-Eruption" in Foraging Southwest Japan (7,300 cal BP)

Major volcanic eruptions are one of the most devastating and unpredictable events for all societies past and present. Although
major progress has been made by archaeologists in understanding volcanic impacts on past societies, almost all this work has
focused on urban or settled agricultural societies. In contrast, there is a major gap in knowledge about how forager communities
were able to respond and recover, though important work has been conducted in northern Europe. In this paper we aim to add to
this emerging knowledge base, and present a case-study from the Pacific “Ring of Fire” – we aim to understand the extent to which
Jōmon Hunter-Fisher-Gatherers were impacted by the Kikai-Akahoya (K-Ah) super-eruption of 7.3ka cal BP, by looking at devastation,
resettlement and recovery with a long-term perspective.
The K-Ah eruption was equivalent to VEI 7 and one of the top 6 large eruptions in the Holocene, which occurred in the ocean off the
coast of Southern Kyushu. It produced more than 100 km3 tephra which covered a 2 million km2 area of Northeast Asia. Tanegashima Island, which is located only about 50 km to the east of the eruption centre, was exposed to the full force of the pyroclastic flow. Everything was destroyed and the entire landscape decked with metres of ash. But within a few centuries, people were back and
recolonised the island. We use the data of site location, lithic tool, and food residue analysis as well as paleo-ecological information
to explore how people adapted to the new environments and estimate the long-term influence of the eruption.
We are in the process of launching a larger interdisciplinary project that will investigate K-Ah impacts and socio-ecological responses across a transect of local and more distant sites and regions.