Understanding the impact of the Toba super-eruption 74,000 years ago requires a highly inter-disciplinary approach, coordinating aspects of the social, physical and chemical sciences. Click on any of the links above to see a short description of our research methods.
The main focus of our project investigates the archaeology of India before and after the Toba super-volcano erupted. As our excavations go deeper we can walk around on land surfaces that have been buried for thousands of years. The bones and plant remains we find on those old surfaces are studied by specialists to help us reconstruct what the vanished landscapes would have looked like. They are helped by geomorphologists, who record how natural phenomena like rivers and mountains have shaped the way landscapes evolve over time.
Other specialists examine the stone tools, art and other objects left by the people who lived in India at the time of the Toba eruption. These tell us what people were doing everyday, and we can see how they changed their lives when the ash fell. Even the soil that the tools and bones are found in can tell us about the climate at the time, using isotopes and sediment analysis. When we find volcanic ash, our volcanologists analyse it to see which volcano it came from, and what the particles making up the ash can tell us about conditions at the time.
All of the specialists benefit from the work done by our dating team, who take samples of sediment and organic material to give us a framework for understanding when people’s behaviour and environment changed, and how quickly.
Finally, we have two groups of specialists who work with computers to give us a ‘big-picture’ perspective on all of our sites and findings. The first of these uses geographical information systems (or GIS) to track the occurrence of archaeological sites and other data (such as the presence of water, vegetation, or stone resources) across the landscape. The second group uses sophisticated computer simulations to model the effects of the Toba super-eruption on global and local climates, allowing us to make predictions about the kinds of evidence we should find in the ground, and even predicting the effects of future super-eruptions.