SCIENTISTS have found what they believe are traces of the lost Indonesian civilization of Tambora, which was wiped out in 1815 by the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history.

Mt. Tambora's cataclysmic eruption on April 10, 1815, smothered villages on the island of Sumbawa with pumice, ash and rock, and buried the island's inhabitants under searing ash, gas and rock. The eruption is blamed for an estimated 88,000 deaths.

Village uncovered

Guided by ground-penetrating radar and a local guide, U.S. and Indonesian scientists working on the island dug in a gully where locals recently had found ceramics and bones, and unearthed the village of Tambora, about 1,300 kilometers east of Indonesia's capital, Jakarta.

"If it's true that they found such remains, it will reveal the culture at that time," said Atje Purbawinata, head of volcano monitoring and research at the Volcanological Survey of Indonesia. "A generation of local people might have been lost due to the eruption. Now it could be revealed what happened."

Uncovering sediment dating back to the eruption, the team discovered ceramic pots, bronze bowls and the carbonized remains of a house with two occupants.

Inside, a woman was found in the kitchen, her hand next to some molten glass bottles. The house, which once stood on wooden stilts with bamboo sides and a thatched roof, had been incinerated into charcoal by the fiery ash that is believed to have reached more than 500 degrees Celsius.

The remains of a second person were found outside what was probably the building's front door. Haraldur Sigurdsson, a volcanologist from the University of Rhode Island who is leading the dig, said the entire village, its occupants and culture were encapsulated beneath the ash, making the finding of great cultural significance.

The remains reveal how the village's nearly 10,000 residents were probably wiped out within moments as the avalanche of hot volcanic ash, rock and gases, known as a pyroclastic flow, struck.

"We know that in an eruption such as that in 1815, that pyroclastic flows extend from the volcano in all directions to a distance of at least 40 kilometers radially and within that zone ... there is an extinction of all life," said Professor Sigurdsson.

The 'lost civilization'

The civilization on Sumbawa Island has intrigued researchers ever since Dutch and British explorers visited in the early 1800s and were surprised to hear a language that did not sound like any other spoken in Indonesia, Sigurdsson said. Some scholars believe the language most closely resembled languages in Indochina. But not long after Westerners first encountered Tambora, the society was destroyed.

"The explosion wiped out the language. That's how big it was," Sigurdsson said. "But we're trying to get these people to speak again, by digging."

Some of what the researchers found may suggest Tambora's inhabitants came from Indochina or had commercial ties with the region, Sigurdsson said. For example, ceramic pottery uncovered during the dig resembles that common to Vietnam and Cambodia.

John Miksic, an archaeologist at the National University of Singapore, has seen video of the dig and said he believes Sigurdsson's team did find a dwelling destroyed by the eruption.

But he doubts the Tamborans were from Indochina or spoke a language from that area. If Vietnamese-style ceramics reached the island, it was probably through trade with intermediaries, Miksic said.

"The ceramic pots and other household materials found might be goods that the people of Tambora traded overseas, the Mon-Khmer culture has actually never been found across Indonesia," said Bagyo Prasetyo, an archeologist with the Center of Archeological Research in Jakarta. "We also need to know if the team did carbon dating."

'The Year Without a Summer'

The 1815 eruption was at least four times more powerful than Mt. Krakatoa's in 1883, which killed 36,000 people in Java and Sumatra and created a cloud of ash that cooled the earth's climate for almost two years. It also dwarfed the volcanic eruption that buried the ancient Roman city of Pompeii.

The impact of the 1815 blast was felt around the world. The volcano ejected more than 30 cubic kilometers of molten material and thrust nearly 400 million tons of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere, which caused a global cooling of nearly 1 degree Celsius, creating what volcanologists refer to as "The Year Without a Summer."

Farms in Maine, in the United States, suffered crop-killing frosts in June, July and August. In France and Germany, grape and corn crops died, or the harvests were delayed, and in Britain, fine particles suspended in the atmosphere created rich, vibrant skies for more than a year.

The Tambora team included researchers from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and the Indonesian Directorate of Volcanology. Sigurdsson and his associates plan to return in 2007 to complete the dig.

The announcement comes three weeks after scientists exploring the mountains in Indonesia's Papua province said they found a "lost world" of at least 35 previously undocumented species, including frogs, butterflies and plants, and a bird of paradise not seen by scientists since the 19th-century.

Indonesia, the world's biggest archipelago, has 129 active volcanoes. The nation's 18,000 islands are prone to earthquakes since the country sits along the Pacific's "ring of fire" zone of active volcanoes and tectonic faults. The country lies above three major tectonic plates, or slabs of the earth's crust that float on the planet's molten core.

The dig will help volcanologists predict the potential dangers of volcanoes which remain active today. By feeding details from Tambora into computer models, they can estimate the lethal reach of those volcanoes should they erupt. "Events of this type will occur in the future, and we should be aware of what could happen," said Sigurdsson.

Editor: Wing