Scientists unearth 'Pompeii of the East'

Tambora's reach was global. It vaulted 400 million tons of sulfur dioxide high into the stratosphere, where it was carried around the world. The compound formed sulfate aerosols, which reflect sunlight back into space. The next year, 1816, would become known as the "the year without summer." The unusually cool climate led to crop failures and famine worldwide.

Sigurdsson, a native of Iceland, has a longstanding interest in the impact of volcanoes on culture. He has worked at Pompeii and Herculaneum in Italy (both buried in 79 AD when Mt. Vesuvius erupted), as well as at the site of the 1982 eruption of El Chichon in Mexico. Tambora's remoteness and the scant scientific record of such an important eruption proved an irresistible lure.

Sigurdsson says he made his first trip to the island in 1986 with a colleague to begin seeking answers to some of the fundamental geological questions about the event. Historical records indicated that the town of Tambora was near where the two scientists were working. At the time it existed, the area was known for its horses, honey, sandalwood, and sappan-wood, which was used to make red dye.

Sigurdsson returned to the island in 2000 to continue his work. There, one of his guides described a gully where people had been finding pottery shards, bones, and bits of bronze. It lay some 16 miles west of the volcano's caldera.

On the last day of the trip, with a boat scheduled to pick the team up the next morning, he and his colleagues set out to find the gully. "It was 5 p.m., and we had to do a 'death march' to get there before dark," he says. What he saw was enough, he says, "to convince me that I had to come back here, that this was a very promising place."

Excavations during a return trip in 2004 yielded the carbonized remains of house beams and the foundation stones around which they collapsed. Scientists also found iron, bronze, and ceramic artifacts, as well as other evidence of human habitation.

Despite the tropical setting, "it didn't rain a drop during the time we were there," says Lewis Abrams, a University of North Carolina geophysicist who worked with Sigurdsson that year, adding that the lack of rain was vital in allowing the team to excavate the house's remains from the gully bed.

Sigurdsson says he hopes to return next year with his team to map the area more fully with ground-penetrating radar, magnetometers, and other remote-sensing tools. Then, he says, he hopes professional archaeologists will pick up the baton, relegating him to more of a supporting role in setting the geophysical context for the area.

Indeed, the work "presents a wonderful opportunity," notes University of Hawaii's Miriam Stark, a professor who specializes in Southeast Asian archaeology. "We need more professional and systematic archaeological work done on the European period across Southeast Asia."

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