Archaeologists have traditionally framed the impacts of natural disasters in terms of societal collapse versus cultural resilience. The 7.3ka cal BP Kikai-Akahoya (K-Ah) ‘super-eruption’ in south-western Japan was among the largest volcanic events of the Holocene. Here, the authors deploy a multi-proxy approach to examine how K-Ah devastated Tanegashima Island. While local Jōmon populations were annihilated, surrounding communities survived and eventually returned, adjusting their subsistence base to survive in the damaged environment. The article concludes that neither ‘collapse’ nor ‘resilience’ fully capture the complex dynamics of this process and that more research is needed to understand how disasters shape cultural trajectories.

The role of ferrous metallurgy in ancient communities of the Circumpolar North is poorly understood due, in part, to the widespread assumption that iron technology was a late introduction, passively received by local populations. Analyses of two recently excavated sites in northernmost Sweden, however, show that iron technology already formed an integral part of the hunter-gatherer subsistence economy in Northern Fennoscandia during the Iron Age (c. 200–50 BC). Such developed knowledge of steel production and complex smithing techniques finds parallels in contemporaneous continental Europe and Western Eurasia. The evidence presented raises broader questions concerning the presence of intricate metallurgical processes in societies considered less complex or highly mobile.