Preface to the special issue dedicated to Archaeoseismology

Abstract

This special issue of Journal of Seismology, dedicated to Archaeoseismology, shows the current trends of research in this young branch of seismology. The beginning of modern archaeoseismological practice during the 1980’s and the investigations made during the 1990’s were in many cases conditioned by the lack of cooperation among the spcialists from different scientific diciplines. Numerous publications resulted from the work of archaeologists, in some cases in collaboration with experts in earthquake-geology or seismology, but rarely such work included a complete and multidisciplinary approach and in situ analysis of the evidence. In many cases, archaeoseismological studies were limited to the detection of traces of past earthquakes in archaeological remains without a seismological perspective aiming to derive quantitative parameters necessary to fully describe a past earthquake (magnitude, etc.). In other cases, such investigations were limited to the analysis of archaeological reports of excavations made years or decades earlier. A step towards the quantification of seismological aspects was represented by the “territorial” approach, trying to reconstruct a picture of an earthquake by detecting its signs over a wider region. This procedure was, however, limited by the scarcity and reliability of published or unpublished archaeological material, usually adopted without a critical review.