Patrick Nunn

History and Memory: Oral Histories and the Science of the Dreaming The power of recall in oral societies is phenomenal … but many scientists have only just started to understand this and think about its implications. In Australia, some of the stories that have been told longest are about ocean rise after the last ice age and the effects of volcanic eruptions, both topics which are covered in this talk. Geologist and climate scientist, Patrick Nunn, Professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast, has written extensively about how many ‘myths and legends’ are not fictions but culturally filtered memories.

In pre-literate (oral) societies, observations of memorable events were encoded into oral traditions and passed down across sometimes hundreds of generations, often as stories. Most such stories to have reached us today are regarded as ‘myth’ or ‘legend’, a default judgement characteristic of many literate people. Recent research, especially in Australia and northwest Europe, concludes that many such stories have a clear grounding in observations of the changes to which they describe, albeit in often exaggerated terms.

This presentation focuses on Scottish stories of coastal landscape change since the last great ice age, some 20,000 years ago. It examines stories of coastal submergence, attributable to sea-level rise, that caused land loss and in particular severed land connections between what are today separate land masses. It also examines stories of (net) coastal emergence, attributable to a net rise in the land resulting from the melting of its ice cover. It is argued that all these stories are likely to be authentic cultural memories of coastal change because all submergence stories come from places known to have been submerged within the past 10-15,000 years while all emergence stories come from places that have indeed experienced net land emergence.

Using various geoscientific data, it is possible to estimate plausible ages for most such stories. Submergence stories from Scotland appear to be based on observations made more than 5000 years ago, some more than 7000 years ago, requiring them to have been passed across 200-300 generations in intelligible form. Emergence stories are of similar age although some appear younger. The antiquity of Scottish stories is comparable to that of Australian and other Celtic stories. This research is important because it demonstrates an unsuspected empirical basis for many ancient stories, suggesting that scientists might fruitfully spend more time interrogating these to see whether they contain information that can broaden and deepen our understanding of human pasts.

People have lived on islands in the western Pacific Ocean for more than three thousand years, developing robust sets of site-specific protocols for anticipating environmental risk (including weather, earthquake, and eruption prediction) that spawned practices for averting risk (such as structures, rituals, and propitiatory behaviours) and accommodating risk (such as optimal settlement location, food-surplus production, and food preservation).

For centuries, we have remained fascinated by the stories of lands lost to the ocean’s surface and history forever. However, the missing pieces of the past have rendered our understanding of these submerged lands incomplete. Are their disappearances based in truth or myth? The ocean’s surface is rising faster than at any time in the last 10,000 years, and understanding the past is crucial to recognizing what lies ahead.