Mt Tungurahua
Image by España. Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte. Archivo General de Indias Mapas y Planos, Panama 180.

This image of Mt. Tungurahua, Ecuador, erupting on 23 April 1773, accompanies a report on the event submitted to the Spanish Crown by Don José Dijuga, President of the Audiencia of Quito, and that colony’s senior administrator.

Both the image and the written report capture important scientific information on the history of a currently active volcano (most recent eruption, August 2012), as well as on associated hazards and impacts, and community responses.

Today they can be found among the 43,000 boxes of visual and written sources held by the Archivo General de Indias (AGI, Seville).

This is the principal archive on the history of the territories that once formed part of the Spanish empire (16th-19th centuries).

Tungurahua’s 1773 eruption served as the kernel of an idea that has resulted in a major cross-faculty initiative.

Led by a team of researchers from the Schools of Modern Languages (Caroline Williams) and Earth Sciences (Kathy Cashman, Erica Hendy, Alison Rust), it is aimed at recovering from the Spanish colonial archive scientifically and socially valuable records that will enable us to study the interconnections between climate, volcanoes, and earthquakes, and their social and economic effects over time.

These questions are of critical importance to researchers in several disciplines, but their evaluation on the basis of short time series of modern observations remains difficult.

Our first pilot study has now been completed.

Funded by the Cabot Institute, Shakia Stewart (MA Latin American History) carried out a month’s research for the team in the AGI.

The primary aim was to determine the potential of colonial documentary sources for testing hypotheses relating specifically to volcano-climate interactions – in this case, with particular reference to the impact of the 1815 Tambora eruption (the largest volcanic eruption over the last 10,000 years) on rainfall, runoff, and tropical cyclone activity in Cuba and Puerto Rico. 

As a result of this work, we have identified the location of a significant body of documentation that has enabled us to both refine and extend the scope of the analysis.

It will now be followed up by Alvaro Guevara, in his jointly supervised doctoral project, funded by the University of Bristol and La Caixa.

Alison Rust

Kathy Cashman

Caroline Williams

Erica Hendy