Oral traditions describing details of ancient volcanic eruptions and their effects
survive throughout the inhabited world. Many such eruptions, especially those having
catastrophic environmental and societal consequences, proved sufficiently memorable
to form the basis of enduring oral traditions. Using global databases, we identified
2306 such eruptions from 477 inhabited locations that occurred before the start of
the Common Era (CE) and are therefore likely to have been the subject of oral traditions.
Of these, we selected 20 events (‘remembered’ Holocene eruptions) for which there
are extant oral (-derived) traditions that demonstrate how such traditions can reveal
details of past volcanism that often are undetectable by retrodictive geoscientific
enquiry. We also selected 20 events (‘forgotten’ Holocene eruptions) about which no
oral traditions are known and discuss the possible reasons for this. Such oral traditions,
while often challenging for conventionally trained geoscientists to interpret, are
valuable yet largely overlooked sources of information about the nature and effects
of Holocene volcanism that can usefully complement geoscientific enquiry. In particular,
we identified locations where memories of such volcanism appear ‘forgotten’ in the
hope that scientists might focus their attention on revealing, identifying, and analyzing
local traditions.
