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Earthquake Archaeology—Just a Good Story?

Investigating the remains of past human activity in search of evidence of ancient earthquakes is the principal objective of archaeoseismology. In this regard, it sits within a continuum of overlapping and complementary subdisciplines that span the broad research realm of earthquake science, specifically bridging the gap between instrumental and historical seismology on one side and paleoseismology and earthquake geology on the other. Each of these research fields focuses on a particular source of data, applies appropriate analytical methods and techniques, and targets a specific time window, which in the case of archaeoseismology tends to be cultural material data spanning the last few millennia. Ultimately, however, each of these discrete subdisciplines converges on a common goal: to reduce the seismic hazard within a region through a better understanding of its earthquake history.

"Ancient accounts of earthquakes do not help us much; they are incomplete, and accuracy is usually sacrificed to make the most of a good story." — Charles Richter

 

Half a century ago, Charles Richter (1958) complained that "ancient accounts of earthquakes do not help us much; they are incomplete, and accuracy is usually sacrificed to make the most of a good story." Those remarks were directed at documentary records of antique earthquakes, but in the intervening 50 years a concerted effort to rigorously extract meaningful quantitative seismic parameters from textual archives has ensured that historical seismology is now an important facet of modern seismic-hazard assessment. Archaeological data, . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Manuel Sintubin

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium)
manuel.sintubin@ees.kuleuven.be

Iain S. Stewart

University of Plymouth (U.K.)
iain.stewart@plymouth.ac.uk

Tina Niemi

University of Missouri-Kansas City (U.S.A.)
niemit@umkc.edu

Erhan Altunel

Eskiehir Osmangazi Üniversitesi (Turkey)
ealtunel@ogu.edu.tr