Oral traditions, myths and a 2.500 year old volcanic eruption.
Can you imagine a scientist who could neither read nor write, who spoke their wisdom in riddles, in tales of fantastic beings flying through the sky, fighting each another furiously and noisily, drinking the ocean dry, and throwing giant spears with force enough to leave massive holes in rocky headlands?
Our newly published research in the journal
Oral Tradition shows memories of a volcanic
eruption in Fiji some 2,500 years ago were encoded in oral traditions in precisely these ways.
They were never intended as fanciful stories, but rather as the pragmatic foundations of a system of local risk management.
Life-changing events
Around 2,500 years ago, at the western end of the island of Kadavu in the southern part of Fiji, the ground shook, the ocean became agitated, and clouds of billowing smoke and ash poured into the sky.
When the clouds cleared, the people saw a new mountain had formed, its shape resembling a mound of earth in which yams are grown. This gave the mountain its name—Nabukelevu, the giant yam mound. (It was renamed Mount Washington during Fiji's colonial history.)
So dramatic, so life-changing were the events
associated with this eruption, the people who witnessed it told stories about it. These stories have endured more than two millennia, faithfully passed on across roughly 100 generations to reach us today.
Scientists used to dismiss such stories as fictions, devalue them with labels like "myth" or "legend". But the situation is changing.
Today, we are starting to recognize that many such "stories" are authentic memories of human pasts, encoded in oral traditions in ways that represent the worldviews of people from
long ago.
Nabukelevu from the northeast, its top hidden in cloud. Inset: Nabukelevu from the west in 1827 after the drawing by the artist aboard the Astrolabe, the ship of French explorer Dumont d’Urville. It is an original lithograph by H. van der Burch after original artwork by Louis Auguste de Sainson. Credit: Wikimedia Commons; Australian National Maritime Museum,
CC BY-SA
In other words, these stories served the same purpose as scientific accounts, and the people who told them were trying to understand the
natural world, much like scientists do today.
Battle of the vu
The most common story about the 2,500-year-old eruption of Nabukelevu is one involving a "god" (
vu in Fijian) named Tanovo from the island of Ono, about 56km from the volcano.
Tanovo's view of the sunset became blocked one day by this huge mountain. Our research identifies this as a volcanic dome that was created during the eruption, raising the height of the mountain several hundred feet.
Enraged, Tanovo flew to Nabukelevu and started to tear down the mountain, a process described by local residents as driva qele (stealing earth). This explains why even today the summit of Nabukelevu has a crater.
https://phys.org/news/2023-08-volcano-eruption-fiji-years-ago100.html
