PROBLEMS OF SCALE: EVALUATING THE EFFECTS OF VOLCANIC DISASTERS ON CULTURAL CHANGE IN WEST NEW BRITAIN, PAPUA NEW GUINEA

Human societies in many parts of Papua New Guinea have experienced numerous volcanic disasters since the region was first colonised. The most recent event, the August 2002 eruption of Pago volcano on the north coast of New Britain, only disrupted the lives of c. 10,000 people for about 4 months. In contrast, significantly long periods of abandonment--in the order of 200-1000 years--following many of the 13 preceding Holocene events from this volcano demonstrate that they had much more devastating effects on human settlement. Not only were key economic resources (e.g. fields, forest, reefs) destroyed, but major changes to the shape of the landscape, drainage patterns, coastlines etc. also resulted from massive pyroclastic flows and falls of airborne tephra. Apart from periodic abandonment, the effects of these sudden environmental catastrophes on long-term trends in human behaviour are surprisingly slight. Very few changes in the cultural lives of the people within the affected region can be directly related to individual volcanic events.

The 6,000 years of disasters in New Britain raises important issues about the temporal and spatial scales that are relevant for understanding the impact of environmental disasters on human societies. A prehistoric archaeological perspective on disasters is likely to vary from those using historical or modern case studies because of the very different scales that are examined. On the short-term abandonment represents a significant impact on human societies, but it may not lead to different subsistence, settlement, or economic behavior when the region is re-colonised. Over the long run the nature of change within the affected area is determined more by the impacts of the event on the region whose scale is defined by the nature of societal interaction at that time, than what happened locally. A comprehensive understanding of the effects of disasters on human societies requires an analysis that focuses on a range of different scales.