ABSTRACT
Just as the progress of a disease shows a doctor the secret life of a body, so to the historian the progress of a great calamity yields valuable information about the nature of the society so stricken. In broad terms, volcanic activity can be both beneficial and detrimental to human adaptation to an environment. The cliche that volcanic soils can be quite rich is accurate, but only after the volcanic detritus has weathered to form that soil. An important variable in the consideration of cases of volcanic impact is the depth of burial of sites and their subsistence sustaining areas. With explosive volcanism, burial is essentially instantaneous, and the depth of burial is proportional to the deleterious impact. Since its birth, Arenal volcano has erupted nine times in a major way, thus providing the opportunity to study the impacts of sudden stresses on egalitarian social groups with diversified subsistence economies and relatively low population densities.
