Volcanoes and Man by Katharine Cashman

Volcanoes are part of the natural environment; for this reason interactions between humans and volcanoes are inevitable. Developing a sustainable strategy for volcanic risk mitigation is thus necessary for communities inhabiting volcanically active areas. Defining strategies as successful requires a perspective that includes not only modern studies of both successes and failures in handling volcanic crises, but also evaluation of past cultures through integration of volcanological studies with archaeological investigations, which provide physical evidence for site abandonment, migrations and cultural change, anthropological studies of societal responses to past and recent volcanic eruptions, and oral traditions, which encode important geologic observations and place disastrous events within the context of cultural beliefs. Together, integration of modern strategies of volcano monitoring and prediction with lessons learned from past events can help us to design an approach to volcanic hazard mitigation that includes the needs of local communities as well as improved resilience of distal communities to disruption posed by far-reaching hazards, such as volcanic ash clouds.

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