An Eruption in Search of a Volcano: local, regional and global frames for the 15th C Kuwae eruption

An Eruption in Search of a Volcano: local, regional and global frames for the 15th C Kuwae eruptionPatrick Boucheron of the Collège de France has made the claim that the eruption of the Kuwae volcano in central Vanuatu in the middle of the 15th century CE “presents itself as a serious candidate for the most significant date in the history of the world in the 15th century”. Major volcanic eruptions offer precise points in time and space around which to organise histories at a range of scales. But how does an event at a local scale become significant at regional and global scales, and how do we write histories across these different registers? The Kuwae eruption, which took place during the 1450s CE, massively reconfigured the social and physical topographies of central Vanuatu, processes recalled in considerable detail in local oral traditions of the Shepherd Islands. Archaeologists, seismologists and climate historians working across the Pacific have then linked this eruption to regional ruptures dated to more or less the same moment in time. Still further afield, in China, Europe and Mexico, historians have ascribed dynastic and civilisational collapses (along with shortages of wine) to the dust veil flung out from this distant island in the South Pacific. In this seminar, I begin the process of exploring not just the evidence for these teleconnections, but also the protocols that we might need to put in place to justify the leaps in causal linkage from one scale to another, and the strategies to be employed in bringing radically different historicities, or ways of thinking and talking about the past, into conversation with each other.