Surviving The Apocalypse: Modelling Multi-Scalar Impacts And Legacies Of An Ancient Mega Disaster on Human Life-Worlds, Technologies And Demography

Archaeologists and historians traditionally frame impacts of environmental catastrophes in terms of societal collapse versus cultural resilience.

This project moves beyond simplistic binary scenarios by completing an ambitious new interdisciplinary analysis of one of the largest ever volcanic disasters to impact global humanity.

The Kikai-Akahoya (K-Ah) ‘super-eruption’ devastated Northeast Asia 7,300-years ago and is seen as a pivotal moment in which thriving societies were abruptly terminated and all subsequent cultural and demographic developments displaced to other regions.

The project takes an entirely new approach and focuses on how some local people, keystone species and certain ecosystems were able to survive K-Ah together, evolve new relationships, and eventually thrive.

To achieve these goals, the project undertakes multi-scalar analysis of different impact zones in the periods prior to, during and long after the catastrophic impacts.

The Nordic-Japan team will data-mine an extensive corpus of dormant legacy data, use targeted scientific analyses and new methods from the computational humanities to resolve fundamental questions about human capacities for survival, creativity and innovation at times when their multi-species lifeworlds experience massive shocks.

With a core focus on the complex dynamics of human survival, research outputs will be shared with academic and societal stakeholders, and generate large digital datasets archived in open-access repositories.