In Troubled Times, in a Divided Country: The 1789 Valtiberina Earthquake - Historical Seismology: Interdisciplinary Studies of Past and Recent Earthquakes - page 244

4 Archive Records and Their Relevance in Reconstructing
the 1789 Earthquake
The first study to make a comparatively extensive use of contemporary archive
records for the reconstruction of the 1789 earthquake was (Castelli et al. 1996).
It hardly needs to say that this statement does not imply any criticism whatsoever
of previous reconstructions. Local erudites - in whose eye the 1789 earthquake was
no more than an anecdote - relied on newspaper accounts as a matter of opportunity
rather than choice. The classical national-scale earthquake compilation by (Baratta
1901) was largely dependent on contributions by local erudites, whose methodolog-
ical biases it inherited. Finally, the 1789 studies by (Boschi et al. 1995; Boschi
et al. 2000) were preliminary ones, based on the “critical revision of existing bib-
liography and of selected sources” (Boschi et al. 2000, p. 843) and not required to
perform any systematic archive research at all, though in fact their references include
some archive records together with a good sample of contemporary newspapers.
However, the importance of archive records for the study of historical earthquake
cannot be overstated, as a quantitative comparison between the 1789 earthquake
intensity map provided by (Boschi et al. 1995) and the one by (Castelli et al. 1996)
(Fig. 3) shows.
Unfortunately, using archive records has some drawbacks too. As Jean Vogt bril-
liantly put it in (Vogt 1993), finding out exactly which records were produced after
a given earthquake and discovering their present whereabouts can be a slow, com-
plicated, and even frustrating task. Now, earthquake historians, particularly if they
are taking part to the compilation of a new catalogue, will sooner or later have to
find an acceptable compromise between thoroughness and the meeting of deadlines.
In the case of the 1789 study by (Castelli et al. 1996) the compromise was reached
by giving priority to the records stored in the central archives of the involved gov-
Fig. 3 1789 intensity maps: a
comparison between (Boschi
et al. 1995) and (Castelli et al.
1996)
Note: Black dots :(Boschi
et al. 1995) White squares :
(Castelli et al. 1996).