Zeitschrift für interdisziplinäre Geschichte, L:1 (Sommer, 2019), 3–30.

Das 50. Jahr: Sonderaufsatz 1

Michael McCormick
Climates of History, Histories of Climate: Aus
History to Archaeoscience Today we have entered an era
of historical discovery that reaches far beyond the study of ancient
climates and modern connections. In a world of learning in-
creasingly blindered by short-sighted metrics of productivity,
translational science, and “impact,” emerging transdisciplinary
paleoclimate studies exemplify the creative power of curiosity-
driven research to understand some of the most important—
In der Tat, potentially civilization-altering—phenomena in the world
in which we and our successors must live. Transdisciplinary
research—that is, research encompassing and transcending two,
three, or more disciplines and asking wholly new questions—
depends on humanists and on scientists.

The discovery of how humans experienced ancient climates is
part of a broader deployment of science to expand the frontiers of
historical knowledge. Cascading breakthroughs characterize an-
cient DNA studies—especially the last few years’ technological and
intellectual advances of the genomic revolution that have unveiled
humanity’s deep history—and biomolecular archaeology’s recov-
ery of ancient biomes and molecules more generally. Paleoclimate
Wissenschaft, zu, is transforming our knowledge of the relations
between human societies and past climates. By adducing new un-
anticipated data, the scientiﬁc revolution now affecting historical
research promises to disrupt, creatively, what we thought we knew
about the human past. But the challenges of integrating scientiﬁc

Michael McCormick is Francis Goelet Professor of Medieval History, Harvard Universität, Und
Co-Director of the Max Planck–Harvard Research Center for the Archaeoscience of the
Ancient Mediterranean Initiative for the Science of the Human Past. He is the author of
Charlemagne’s Survey of the Holy Land: Wealth, Personnel and Buildings of a Mediterranean Church
between Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Masse., 2011); Origins of the European
Economy: Communications and Commerce, A.D. 300–900 (New York, 2001); co-author of
“The Climate and Environment of Byzantine Anatolia: Integrating Science, Geschichte, Und
Archaeology,” Zeitschrift für interdisziplinäre Geschichte, XLV (2015), 113–161.

© 2019 vom Massachusetts Institute of Technology und The Journal of Interdisciplinary
Geschichte, Inc., https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_a_01374

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4 | MI CH A E L MC CO R M IC K

evidence into historical analysis call for new approaches suited to
a new historical discipline that we may broadly characterize as
archaeoscience.1

Knowledge of past environments has grown by studying
nature through history and by studying history through nature.
This sketch is perforce incomplete: Publications proliferate too fast
to do justice to all that has appeared. In this journal’s last ﬁve vol-
umes alone, more than a dozen articles have focused on climate
and history. The sketch will also be a little personal, in the hope
that one scholar’s experience can serve others. But that brings
another limitation; it reﬂects a perspective largely conﬁned to
the ancient and medieval civilizations of western Eurasia.2

NATURE FROM HISTORY The study of climate in history has been
around for a long time, but it accelerated in the 1960s. National
scientiﬁc societies in the United States organized exploratory
conferences in 1962 on the paleoclimatology of the eleventh to
the sixteenth centuries A.D., and in the United Kingdom in 1966

1 David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the
Human Past (New York, 2018); Christina Warinner, Alexander Herbig, et al., “A Robust
Framework for Microbial Archaeology,” Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics,
XVIII (2017), 321–356.
2 For recent work about climate and history in this journal, see Morgan Kelly and Cormac
Ó Gráda, “The Waning of the Little Ice Age: Climate Change in Early Modern Europe,”
Zeitschrift für interdisziplinäre Geschichte, XLIV (2013), 301–325; Sam White, “The Real Little Ice
Alter,” ebenda., 327–352; Ulf Büntgen and Lena Hellmann, “The Little Ice Age in Scientiﬁc Per-
spective: Cold Spells and Caveats,” ebenda., 353–368; Jan de Vries, “The Crisis of the Seven-
teenth Century: The Little Ice Age and the Mystery of the ‘Great Divergence,’” ibid.,
369–377; John Haldon, Neil Roberts et al., “The Climate and Environment of Byzantine
Anatolia: Integrating Science, Geschichte, and Archaeology,” ebenda., XLV (2014), 113–161; Kelly
and Ó Gráda, “Debating the Little Ice Age,” ebenda., 57–68; Dagomar Degroot, “Testing the Limits
of Climate History: The Quest for a Northeast Passage during the Little Ice Age, 1594–1597,”
ibid. (2015), 459–484; Kyle Harper, “Civilization, Climate and Malthus: The Rough Course of
Global History,” ebenda., 549–566; Hui-wen Koo, “Weather, Harvests, and Taxes: A Chinese
Revolt in Colonial Taiwan,” ebenda., XLVI (2016), 39–59; Enric Tello, José Luis Martínez, et al.,
“The Onset of the English Agricultural Revolution: Climate Factors and Soil Nutrients,” ebenda.,
XLVII (2017), 445–474; John L. Brooke, “Malthus and the North Atlantic Oscillation: A Reply
to Kyle Harper,” ebenda., 563–578; Harper, “A Reply to John L. Brooke’s ‘Malthus and the North
Atlantic Oscillation,’” ibid., 579–584; Timothy P. Newﬁeld and Inga Labuhn, “Realizing Consilience
in Studies of Pre-Instrumental Climate and Pre-Laboratory Disease,” ebenda., XLVIII (2017), 211–240;
Nicola Di Cosmo, Amy Hessl, et al., “Environmental Stress and Steppe Nomads: Rethinking the
History of the Uyghur Empire (744–840) with Paleoclimate Data,” ebenda., XLVIII (2018), 439–463;
Yali Li, Gideon Shelach-Lavi, and Ronnie Ellenblum, “Short-Term Climatic Catastrophes and
the Collapse of the Liao Dynasty (907–1125): Textual Evidence,” ebenda., XLIX (2019), 591–610.

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| 5

FR O M H IS T O R Y T O AR C H A E O S C I E N C E
on climate from 8000 to “0” B.C. Around that time, most scholars
inclined to the view that climate during the last 10,000 years or so
has largely been unchanging. Only a very few, like Carpenter
(1889–1980), challenged the conventional wisdom. Carpenter no-
tably cited Herodotus 7.171 on the famine and pestilence that deso-
lated Crete after the Trojan War, as well as evidence that he had
collected from climatological studies, to deduce drought c. 1200 B.C.
as the root of the Mycenaean collapse known from archaeology.3
Two ﬁgures were pivotal in alerting historians to the possibil-
ities of climate for studying historical change. In Britain, Lamb
(1913–1997), a distinguished climatologist, ingeniously evaluated
scattered anecdotes of weather events recorded in historical re-
cords, thereby demonstrating his deep understanding of climate
patterns. His broad syntheses opened the eyes of many scholars
(including this one) to climate’s historical potential. In France,
Fernand Braudel (1902–1985) and the Annales school extended
the historian’s remit to include the natural environment along with
long-lived economic and cultural structures. Braudel famously laid
out the environmental framework of Mediterranean history, Und,
ten years later, Le Roy Ladurie’s innovations in medieval agrarian
and environmental history produced the landmark “History of

3 For an American pioneer in climate study, see Ellsworth Huntington, The Pulse of Asia: A
Journey in Central Asia Illustrating the Geographic Basis of History (Boston, 1907); idem, “Climatic
Change and Agricultural Exhaustion as Elements in the Fall of Rome,” Quarterly Journal of
Economics, XXXI (1917), 173–208, repr. in Mortimer Chambers (Hrsg.), The Fall of Rome:
Can It Be Explained? (New York, 1963), 55–61. For Huntington’s intellectual trajectory, In-
cluding his involvement with the eugenics movement, see Keay Davidson, “Huntington,
Ellsworth (1876–1947), Explorer and Geographer,” in Susan Ware (Hrsg.), American National
Biography Online (New York, 1999), available at http://www.anb.org/ (accessed June 18,
2018). For a European pioneer, see Otto Pettersson (1848–1941), whose Climatic Variations
in Historic and Prehistoric Time (Berlin, 1914), 1–27, treats medieval Iceland and Greenland
(7–10); medieval storm ﬂoods (15–17); and ocean circulation, freezing seas, and herring
ﬁsheries (20–23). See also Artur Svansson, “Otto Pettersson,” in Göran Nilzén (Hrsg.), Svenskt
biograﬁskt leksikon (Stockholm, 1995–1997), 261–269. Historians of science will know other
early explorers of history and climate who go unmentioned herein.

See Hubert H. Lamb, review of Rhys Carpenter, Discontinuity in Greek Civilization, Ein-
tiquity, XLI (1966), 234. About the 1965 scientiﬁc conference in Boulder that pioneered a
continuing interest in global warming, see Reid A. Bryson and Christine Padoch, “On the
Climates of History,” in the special issue, “History and Climate,” Zeitschrift für Interdisziplinäre
Geschichte, X (1980), 584–585 (other citations from this memorable issue are scattered throughout
these notes). Carpenter, Discontinuity in Greek Civilisation (Cambridge, 1966). For the view that
climate was stable and humans caused environmental change, see Rhoads Murphey, “The
Decline of North Africa since the Roman Occupation: Climatic or Human?” Annals of the
Association of American Geographers, XLI (1951), 116–132.

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6 | MI CH A E L MC CO R M IC K
the Climate after 1000.” Important contributions multiplied
thereafter—for example, Pﬁster’s work in Switzerland (1975 Und
1984) and Alexandre’s in Belgium (1976 Und 1987). Alexandre’s
critical catalog of historical testimony about weather events pro-
vided an invaluable reference work for medieval climate history.
Pﬁster successfully developed ﬁne-grained monographs about early
modern climate variability and social and economic responses,
creating, with his collaborators, research tools for other scholars’
beneﬁt (siehe unten). Engagement with climate as a historical prob-
lem was also emerging in other scholarly traditions, such as the
work on China by Zhu Kezhen (1890–1974).4

Von 1979, what we might call the historians’ history of climate
was generating enough interest that this journal devoted a con-
ference and a prescient issue to the theme, including Le Roy
Ladurie’s contribution about the dates of French wine harvests
since the ﬁfteenth century as a proxy for summer weather. Darüber hinaus
Lamb, climatologists were also availing themselves of historical
records. In 1984, NASA scientist Richard Stothers turned to four
late antique eyewitnesses to establish the character and potential
impact of the “536 event” (siehe unten), which he identiﬁed to
be volcanic, as ice-core research has recently conﬁrmed. Reich
though it was, the initial harvest was limited nevertheless by what

4 For a thoughtful use of historical evidence, see Lamb, “The Early Medieval Warm Epoch and
Its Sequel,” Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, ICH (1965), 13–37; for the early medieval
warm period, idem, Climate, History and the Modern World (New York, 1995; orig. Kneipe. 1982).
0
Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l
époque de Philippe II (Paris, 1949);
idem, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (New York, 1972), ICH,
25–352. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “Histoire et climat,„Annalen: économies, sociétés, civilisations,
14 (1959), 3–34; idem, Histoire du climat depuis l’an mil (Paris, 1967); idem, Times of Feast, Times of
Famine: A History of Climate since the Year 1000 (New York, 1971). See also the review of the
English translation by John D. Post, “Meteorological Historiography,” Zeitschrift für Interdisziplinäre
Geschichte, III (1973), 721–732; Isabelle Chuine, Pascal Yiou, et al., “Grape Harvest Dates and
Temperature Variations in Eastern France since 1370,” Nature, CDXXXII (2004), 289–290;
Le Roy Ladurie, Daniel Rousseau, et al., Les ﬂuctuations du climat de l’an mil à nos jours (Paris,
2011). Christian Pﬁster, Agrarkonjunktur und Witterungsverlauf im westlichen Schweizer Mittelland,
1755–1797 (Bern, 1975); idem, Das Klima der Schweiz von 1525–1860 und seine Bedeutung in der
Geschichte von Bevölkerung und Landwirtschaft (Bern, 1984); Pierre Alexandre, Le climat au Moyen
Âge en Belgique et dans les régions voisines (Rhénanie, Nord de la France) (Louvain, 1976); idem, Le
climat en Europe au Moyen Âge: contribution à lʼhistoire des variations climatiques de 1000 hat 1425, d’après
les sources narratives de l’Europe occidentale (Paris, 1987); Pﬁster, “Climate and Economy in
Eighteenth-Century Switzerland,” Zeitschrift für interdisziplinäre Geschichte, IX (1978), 223–243; Rudolf
Brázdil, Pﬁster, et al., “Historical Climatology in Europe—the State of the Art,” Climatic Change,
LXX (2005), 363–430. Ka-Wai Fan, “Climatic Change and Dynastic Cycles in Chinese History:
A Review Essay,” WIRES Climate Change, VI (2010), 225–226.

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| 7

FR O M H IS T O R Y T O AR C H A E O S C I E N C E
Le Roy Ladurie evocatively called “the sound barrier” of the year
1000. Historians relying on written evidence had difﬁculty pushing
further back into the ﬁrst millennium of our era for which such
sources have survived less abundantly, at least in western Eurasia.5

Independently of environmentally curi-
HISTORY FROM NATURE
ous historians, the explosive growth of scientiﬁc and technological
innovation from or starting in the 1960s and 1970s accelerated
modern climate science. Satellite-based instrumentation multiplied
many-fold the quantity, Qualität, and geographical scope of mea-
surements pertaining to ongoing climate phenomena. New mea-
surements signaled unexpected phenomena in the present and
recent past. Cascading observations and efforts to detect systems
and mechanisms and to distinguish random variation from causal
chains or systemic shifts drove the insight that understanding cur-
rent data required a time scale deeper than the existing instrumen-
tal records. Thus began the hunt for “proxy” measures, natürlich
archives generated by natural phenomena that could be under-
stood to preserve some kind of climate signal. To gauge the sig-
niﬁcance of increasing quantities of precise and continuous
measurements of today’s climate with growing global coverage,
earth scientists began to develop their own history of climate by
identifying proxy witnesses reﬂecting precipitation, temperature,
or movements of air masses before the instrumental era. Con-
structing such long-term records is essential to assessing the abnor-
mality of emergent patterns detected by instruments measuring
present-day climate change.

Identiﬁcation of environmentally driven variation in the
formation of various natural organisms and deposits has made
tremendous progress since this journal’s special issue of 1980 pre-
sented what was then known about solar activity, botanical data,
tree rings, and isotopes. Recent work has vastly expanded these

5 Le Roy Ladurie and Micheline Baulant, “Grape Harvests from the Fifteenth through the
Neunzehnte Jahrhunderte,” in the special issue, “History and Climate,” 839–849; Stothers,
“Mystery Cloud of AD 536,” Nature, CCCVII (1984), 344–345; Michael Sigl, Mai Winstrup,
et al., “Timing and Climate Forcing of Volcanic Eruptions for the Past 2,500 Years,” ebenda.,
523 (2015), 543–549. That volcano has just been identiﬁed in Iceland from tephra discovered
in the Historical Ice Core Project (siehe unten). This new information should allow more pre-
cise and detailed reconstruction of its climatic impact: Christopher P. Loveluck, McCormick,
et al., “Alpine Ice-Core Evidence for the Transformation of the European Monetary System,
AD 640–670,” Antiquity, XCII (2018), 1571–1585.

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8 | MI CH A E L MC CO R M IC K

natural archives, added new ones, elucidated their mechanisms,
and better calibrated the amplitude of the proxy witnesses’ signals
against the record of ever-lengthening instrumental measurements.
Tree rings, ice cores, limestone cave deposits, and lake sediments
are among the most widely deployed proxies in historical studies
Heute; alle, save glacier ice cores, are relatively well distrib-
uted across Eurasia.6

Tree Rings Tree rings were one of earliest proxy sources, Und
they remain one of the most powerful. Wieder, curiosity-driven sci-
ence led to breakthroughs that transformed the evidentiary basis
for understanding climate. From the last century’s early years,
Douglass (1867–1962), an astronomer, investigated sunspot cyles
from tree rings. Demonstrating climatic effects on long series of
tree rings further opened his eyes to the possibility of using rings’
time-stamped variations to date the enigmatic Amerindian ruins in
die USA. Southwest where he was working. Efforts to build well-
replicated tree-ring inventories that went far back in time where
they once grew spread across Europe in the post–World War II
Jahre, particularly in the German-speaking lands, Scandinavia,
and the British Isles; the areas around the Mediterranean, mit
one or two notable exceptions, have lagged considerably. Properly
developed and analyzed, tree rings can resolve to absolutely dated
individual years. They allow robust proxy reconstructions of pre-
cipitation and even temperature for some areas that are absolutely
dated as far back as 2,500 Jahre. Of particular value to historians
and archaeologists are Cook’s comprehensive historical atlases of
annual precipitation reconstruction created throughout decades of
dendroecological research, which are freely available online.7

See in this journal’s special issue, “History and Climate,” John A. Eddy, “Climate and the
6
Role of the Sun,” ibid, 725–747; Thompson Webb, “The Reconstruction of Climatic Se-
quences from Botanical Data,” ebenda., 749–772; Harold C. Fritts, G. Robert Lofgren, et al.,
“Past Climate Reconstructed from Tree Rings,” ebenda., 773–793. Alexander T. Wilson, “Iso-
tope Evidence for Past Climatic and Environmental Change,” ebenda., 795–812. For a detailed
survey of the main types of proxy evidence from nature, see Raymond S. Bradley, Paleocli-
matology: Reconstructing Climates of the Quaternary (Amsterdam, 2014; orig. Kneipe. 1985), 137–516.
The book has been heavily revised and updated since its original publication.
7 Andrew E. Douglass, Climatic Cycles and Tree-Growth ( Washington, D.C., 1919–1936). Für
an overview of tree-ring work, see Bradley, Paleoclimatology, 452–499; for eastern Mediterra-
nean projects, Cornell’s Laboratory for Aegean and Near Eastern Dendrochronology, verfügbar-
able at https://dendro.cornell.edu/ and Arizona’s Aegean Dendrochronology Project,
available at http://ltrr.arizona.edu/aegean. Büntgen, Willy Tegel, et al., “2500 Years of
European Climate Variability and Human Susceptibility,” Science, CCCI (2011), 578–582;

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FR O M H IS T O R Y T O AR C H A E O S C I E N C E

| 9

Ice Cores

Ice cores drilled in glaciers capture the atmospheric
chemistry trapped in snow that fell and transformed into ice. Sie
offer an exceptionally wide spectrum of proxy indicators of an-
cient environments, including volcanic activity, temperatures,
movements of air masses, and atmospheric deposition of anthropo-
genic pollutants such as lead. In the best cases, ice cores display
annual or, lately, sub-annual resolutions capable of correlation
with geological (volcanic eruptions) or historical events sometimes
down to the exact year or season. Until 2017, most ice-core evi-
dence of interest to historians came from the great glaciers of
Greenland and Antarctica, welche sind 3 km deep and cover c.
100,000 years of climate in Greenland and 800,000 in Antarctica.
Greenland’s ice cores preserve high accumulations of snow, daher
forming deep annual ice layers large enough for detection by stan-
dard technology—Continuous Flow Analysis—at resolutions of
C. 1.0 cm.8

The polar cores have the disadvantage of being remote from
the main theaters of human history; they often capture atmospher-
ically transported markers from an entire hemisphere or more (Und
therefore blur their speciﬁc geographical origins). Because they are
much smaller and their older ice layers highly compressed and
thin, more strategically situated glaciers from the Alps, for exam-
Bitte, have not yielded, until last year, useful signals dating back
more than a few hundred years. Jetzt, Jedoch, next-generation
technology—in the form of ultra–high-resolution analysis devel-
oped by the Climate Change Institute (CCI) of the University of
Maine—has opened the way to recovering new historically dat-
able environmental and cultural records from ancient ice in the
heart of Europe and elsewhere. This technology has found its ﬁrst

Jürg Luterbacher, Johannes P. Werner, et al., “European Summer Temperatures since Roman
Times,” Environmental Research Letters, XI (2016), 024001; Edward R. Cook, North American
Drought Atlas: A History of Meteorological Drought Reconstructed from 835 Tree-Ring Chronologies for
the Past 2005 Years, verfügbar unter https://iridl.ldeo.columbia.edu/SOURCES/.LDEO/.TRL/
.NADA2004/.pdsi-atlas.html; idem, Old World Drought Atlas, verfügbar unter https://www.ncdc.
noaa.gov/paleo-search/study/19419; idem, Richard Seager, et al., “Old World Megadroughts
and Pluvials during the Common Era,” Science Advances, ICH (2015), e1500561.
8 For an overview of some of the key historical paleoclimate parameters from ice cores, sehen
McCormick, Büntgen, et al., “Climate Change during and after the Roman Empire and Its
Successors: Reconstructing the Past from Scientiﬁc and Historical Evidence,” Journal of Inter-
disciplinary History, XLIII (2012), 209–210.

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10 | M IC H A E L M CC O R MI C K
major application in the Maine–Harvard Historical Ice Core
Project (siehe unten).9

Speleothems, Sedimentary Deposits, Pollen, et al. Other natural
archives are also accumulating. Speleothems—limestone cave de-
posits, typically stalagmites, arising from groundwater percolation—
form in patterns that can be annual or even sub-annual. Sie sind
capable of providing insight into precipitation and temperature
through the isotopic ratios of key elements and datable through
such advanced techniques as uranium–thorium dating. Sedimen-
tary deposits on lake bottoms are sometimes annually sealed
(varves), preserving various atmospherically transported deposits.
Fossilized pollen trapped there yields information about, among
other things, plant spectra. As a sensitive indicator of the human
impact on a botanical community at a given time, they can reveal,
sagen, the expansion or contraction of woodland at the expense of
cultivation or changing preferences in cultivated plants. Pollen
spectra, Jedoch, typically register only changes in temperature
and precipitation that are dramatic enough to alter the plant com-
munity; rarely do sedimentary deposits achieve a chronological
resolution superior to that of radiocarbon dating. Other well-
established or emerging methods continue to provide new data sets
that enrich our knowledge about climates of the past, from cosmo-
genic isotopes (Zum Beispiel, 14C) to archaeologically recovered in-
sects or marine sediments. Certain clams (Arctica islandica) turn out
to have annual rings with isotopic ratios that can serve to recon-
struct ocean temperatures, a key factor in global climate.10

A ﬁnal tool for reconstructing ancient climates comes from
the increasing power of climate analysis and modeling. As com-
puting power and speed mount, models absorb and manipulate

Sharon B. Sneed, Paul A. Mayewski, et al., “Instruments and Methods: New LA-ICP-MS
9
Cryocell and Calibration Technique for Sub-Millimeter Analysis of Ice Cores,” Journal of
Glaciology, LXI (2015), 233–242.
10 Bradley, Paleoclimatology; McCormick, Büntgen et al., “Climate Change during and after
the Roman Empire,” 212–213, 216–217. The “European Pollen Database,” available at
http://www.europeanpollendatabase.net/, offers easy access to fossilized pollen records col-
lected around Europe. Hilmar A. Holland, Bernd R. Schöne, et al., “Decadal Climate Var-
iability of the North Sea during the Last Millennium Reconstructed from Bivalve Shells
(Arctica islandica),” The Holocene, XXIV (2014), 771–786; Paul G. Diener, Alan D. Wanamaker,
Jr., et al., “Variability of Marine Climate on the North Icelandic Shelf in a 1357-Year Proxy
Archive Based on Growth Increments in the Bivalve Arctica Islandica,” Palaeogeography,
Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, CCCLXXIII (2013), 141–151.

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| 11

ever-growing amounts of emerging high-quality data. Mathemat-
ical simulation of climate patterns allows us increasingly to model
them and thereby test possible connections and correlations be-
tween signals and climate structure, as well as their consequences.
Bedauerlicherweise, most such programs are not openly available for
scholars’ experimentation. A notable exception is the CCI’s Climate
Re-Analyzer™, which allows users to examine and simulate
climate patterns with different boundary conditions.11

Notwithstanding these impressive new data, many climate
scientists recognize that human beings recording conditions in a
particular time and place are the most powerful paleoclimate prox-
ies. Scientists have therefore welcomed the collaboration of pro-
fessional historians and archaeologists to help them to understand
the “fuzzy data” that are the hallmark of human history. Reich
though it be, the testimony of rare words in ancient languages
or of structural remains in ancient landscapes can be challenging.
Collaborative research that integrates the different methods and
data of historians, archaeologists, philologists, and scientists is the
way of the future.

NASCENT SYNTHESIS: THE CONSILIENCE OF THE HUMANITIES AND
SCIENCES From these separate efforts have come research tools
that lay the foundation for new discoveries. Since c. 1900 mindestens,
scholars have cataloged written reports about climate. Hennig
(1874–1951) published a preliminary inventory of weather events
In 1904. Expanding on this foundation was the useful but some-
times uncritical multi-volume omnium-gatherum of reports from
the beginning of the Christian era until 1850 initially collected by
Weikinn (1888–1966), a dedicated amateur. Alexandre, a medie-
valist, produced a resource with an unprecedented level of detail
and quality for Europe from 1000 Zu 1425 A.D. Although the
languages of their publication lessen the inﬂuence that they de-
serve to exert, high-quality repertories of written evidence have
appeared recently for the Low Countries (763–1800, so far) Und
the Byzantine Empire and its neighbors (300 Zu 1479). That these
valuable contributions currently exist only in printed form limits

11 For CCI’s Climate Re-Analyzer™, see http://cci-reanalyzer.org/.

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12 | M IC H A E L M CC O R MI C K
their usefulness for twenty-ﬁrst-century research, although efforts
are afoot to create online analogs of these pioneering efforts.12

Although it is often impossible digitally to search, correct,
concatenate, or mathematically to correlate printed or restricted
works online with new, especially scientiﬁc, proxy data, Pﬁster
and his team at the University of Bern made its Euro-Climhist
Datenbank, initiated in the 1970s, available on the website of the
NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Paleocli-
matology Data. Whatever online websites they may choose to de-
velop, historians of climate should emulate their colleagues in
climate science by making their data freely available for direct
download and analysis. Als typisches Beispiel, a Franco-Spanish group
In 2012 prepared and shared through open access a grape-harvest
database offering precious proxies for summer warmth as far back
als 1354 A.D. In 2016, German historians made freely available
German translations of a rich collection of Arabic and other
Middle Eastern environmental reports covering 801 Zu 1821 A.D. Das
they had developed over several decades.13

The Science of the Human Past (SoHP) Digital Atlas team at
Harvard University has been endeavoring to do likewise since
2011. Among the draft historical-climate data sets that this
student–teacher team has created, and that any user can download
by clicking a button, are written sources for Central European

12 Richard Hennig, Katalog bemerkenswerter Witterungsereignisse von den ältesten Zeiten bis zum
Jahre 1800 (Berlin, 1904); Curt Weikinn and Michael Börngen, Quellentexte zur Witterungs-
geschichte Europas von der Zeitwende bis zum Jahre 1850 (Berlin, 1958–2002), 6 v.; Alexandre,
Le climat en Europe au Moyen Âge (the geographical classiﬁcations and source references are
not always easy to manipulate); Jan Buisman and Aryan F. V. van Engelen, Duizend jaar weer,
wind en water in de Lage Landen (Franeker, 1995-), 6 v.; Ioannes G. Telelēs, Μετεωρολογικά
φαινόμενα και κλίμα στο Βυζάντιο (Athen, 2004), 2 v. A database incorporating the famine-
related materials in Alexandre’s works (N. 4) is presently under construction: Jean-Pierre Devroey
and Alexis Wilkin, FAMe: Famines in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: An Electronic Database, verfügbar-
able at http://fame.otlet-institute.org/. See also n. 14.
13 Euro-Climhist Database, available at http://www.euroclimhist.unibe.ch/; Pﬁster, “His-
torical Weather Indices from Switzerland,” the NOAA National Centers for Environmental
Information, verfügbar unter https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo-search/study/5411; Valérie
Daux, Iñaki Garcia de Cortazar-Atauri, et al., “An Open-Access Database of Grape Harvest
Dates for Climate Research: Data Description and Quality Assessment,” Climate of the Past,
VIII (2012), 1403–1418, available for download at https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo-search/
study/13194. See as a data set in either pdf or csv format, Steffen Vogt, Rüdiger Glaser, et al.,
“The Grotzfeld Data Set—Coded Environmental, Climatological and Societal data for the
Near and Middle East from AD 801 to 1821” (2016), verfügbar unter https://d-nb.info/
1124005161/34; for the data set, doi: 10.6094/tambora.org/2016/c156/data.zip.

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| 13

extreme precipitation from 1013 Zu 1504 A.D. (2011), climate
events under the Roman Empire from 100 B.C. Zu 800 A.D.
(2012), climate events from 800 Zu 1300 A.D. (2016), and climate
reports for the same period (2016). All of them, which build on the
commendable printed work of our predecessors, are available to be
edited and developed freely under a “Creative Commons” license.
As swiftly as our modest resources allow, we aim to produce and
distribute our data sets ultimately as geodatabases—that is, data sets
geocoded for digital latitude and longitude—in order to allow spa-
tial as well as temporal analysis. We hope to be able to continue
improving these drafts. We uploaded them as soon as possible so
that others could use them right away. Many of us began our ca-
reers when printing texts on paper, the only option, was expensive
and cumbersome, and the results had to be as close to perfect as
möglich, since it was often too costly to print corrections and
new editions. Heute, because digital publication online has ban-
ished most expenses beyond the time and scholarly effort required
to prepare original versions and subsequent revisions, our new data
sets can appear almost immediately, ready for broader use.14

One challenge that historians face in producing data sets for
the natural sciences arises from our expertise in dealing with the
fuzzy data that characterize human discourse. In producing a crit-
ical record of historical evidence about climate, we must take into
account the needs of climatologists, economists, and political sci-
entists in addition to respecting the demands of our own discipline.
Reﬂecting our complex sources, we historians sometimes formu-
late our observations in elaborate, nuanced, and even ambiguous
Bedingungen, in ways that can frustrate our colleagues in other disciplines.
As Lamb saw long ago, our best research will be useless to scientists
unless we evaluate phenomena in a way that lends itself to numer-
ical analysis. Our classiﬁcations must be as rigorous as possible,

See McCormick, Eurydice Georganteli, et al. (Hrsg.), Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval
14
Civilizations [DARMC], Version 1.3.1 (2014), “Data Availability,” available at https://darmc.
harvard.edu/data-availability. The conditions of use are as liberal as possible: “This work is
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Interna-
tional License. In the context of the DARMC project, this means that you are free to take
and build upon our work in your own scholarship, as long as you acknowledge DARMC
and the original content creators as the source of the data. You are free to remix and rehost
this data, and to release derived products. DARMC is committed to making spatial-historical data
freely available to the academic community; under no circumstances may you charge money
for access to this data.”

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14 | M IC H A E L M CC O R MI C K
using even simple numerical values—say, a scale from 1 Zu 4, aus
“least strong” to “strongest.” They should describe, mindestens,
the reliability of the records at hand, as well as the nature, Stärke,
and spatio-temporal extent of the phenomena recorded. Users
should be able to adapt downloadable data sets according to the
different schemes that they devise; the key requirement is that
the testimony be classiﬁed as consistently as possible and that the
classiﬁcations be explained clearly. No less importantly, if the con-
nections that historians make are to ﬁnd acceptance among scien-
tists, they must be subjected to testing with the statistical methods
that are de rigueur in the sciences, whenever feasible.15

At one level, the work of historians should be joyfully ancil-
lary and creatively critical; written evidence can verify the accuracy
of the climate phenomena that scientists deduce from comparing
modern instrumental readings and scientiﬁc proxies. Zum Beispiel,
a few years ago, historical records elegantly conﬁrmed the dendro-
ecological reconstruction of spring precipitation in northeastern
Frankreich, as well as in northeastern and southeastern Germany, aus
250 B.C. Zu 2000 A.D. based on the analysis of 7,000 tree-ring series. ICH
asked dendroecologists for records about all the later medieval ex-
treme droughts and rainfalls deduced from the tree rings, expecting
the relevant written records to be strong enough to test whether
eyewitnesses in the same places where the trees were located actu-
ally observed the extreme rainfall or drought that the dendroecol-
ogists had gleaned from the rings. Büntgen identiﬁed thirty-two
extreme precipitation years from 1013 Zu 1504 A.D., for which I
was able to locate eighty-eight such eyewitness accounts. For thirty
of those thirty-two years, at least one medieval written record re-
ported the same precipitation extreme as the scientists deduced

15 Lamb, “Early Medieval Warm Epoch,” 20–22, lays out his solution of numerical indices.
For a thorough description of the process applied in the Grotzfeld Middle Eastern data set, sehen
Vogt, Glaser, et al., “Grotzfeld data set,” 7–8; for various quantiﬁcation procedures developed
in the exploitation of Chinese historical records, Jiacheng Zhang and Thomas J. Crowley,
“Historical Climate Records in China and Reconstruction of Past Climates,” Journal of Cli-
mate, II (1989), 839–841; for an example of more complex quantiﬁcation into thermal and
precipitation indices, Pﬁster, “The Little Ice Age: Thermal and Wetness Indices for Central
Europa,” in the special issue, “History and Climate,” 665–696. Nick Patterson, “Appendix: A
Statistical Analysis,” in McCormick, Paul Edward Dutton, et al., “Volcanoes and the Climate
Forcing of Carolingian Europe, A.D. 750–950,” Speculum, LXXXII (2007), 894–895; Zsolt
Pinke, László Ferenczi, et al., “Zonal Assessment of Environmental Driven Settlement Aban-
donment in the Trans-Tisza Region (Central Europe) during the Early Phase of the Little Ice
Alter,” Quaternary Science Reviews, CLVII (2017), 106 (Figur 5).

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FR O M H IS T O R Y T O AR C H A E O S C I E N C E
from the tree rings, independently conﬁrming the accuracy of the
dendro-reconstruction of spring precipitation.16

| 15

This collaboration of humanists and scientists illustrates one
response to Wilson’s eloquent call for reuniting the “Two Cultures”
of humanists and scientists through consilience. Consilience arises
when independent approaches allow distinct analyses to “jump
together” (Latin consalire) in a transdisciplinary conclusion for
which the probative power resides in the emergence of the same
results from independent investigations in independent disciplines
from independent evidence. The results both stem from and con-
ﬁrm the unity of the reality that each investigation observes on its
own.17

Daher, we can use our written records to test and reinforce re-
sults achieved through scientiﬁc methods. But even more impor-
tant for historians seeking to clarify the environmental context is
the unavoidable fact that the historical record does not by itself
afford a complete understanding of climates before recent times.
The ancient and medieval written sources may be richer than is
often supposed, but they are uneven. Because wide and unpredict-
able gaps undercut the coverage of most periods and phenomena,
arguments from silence are usually precarious. We cannot there-
fore build a climate history from the written records alone, espe-
cially, as Le Roy Ladurie emphasized, Vor 1000 A.D. To go
deeper, we must integrate our historical record with the scientiﬁc
signals of climate deduced from natural-proxy archives, welche
expands the detailed climate horizons presently available to us
beyond a few centuries to 2,000 years or more.18

An early hint of the historical potential of the new data came
during the 1990s from the detection of atmospheric depositions of
lead and copper in a Greenland ice core that seemed to show
broad associations with suspected patterns of ancient and medieval

16 Büntgen, Tegel, et al., “2500 Years of European Climate Variability.” The two excep-
tions in the sources were among the mostly poorly documented years, each having only one
report of uncertain relevance.
17 Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York, 1998); McCormick,
“Historyʼs Changing Climate: Climate Science, Genomics and the Emerging Consilient Ap-
proach to Interdisciplinary History,” Zeitschrift für interdisziplinäre Geschichte, XLII (2011), 252–273.
18 For an effective statement about the use of written records to reinforce scientiﬁc results,
see the prize-winning undergraduate research of Matthew T. Luongo, “Comparison and
Calibration of Climate Proxy Data in Medieval Europe,” as-yet unpub. senior thesis (Harvard
Univ., 2017).

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16 | M IC H A E L M CC O R MI C K

metal production in western Eurasia and China. Similar evidence
from bog and other sedimentary deposits pointed in the same di-
rection, but such deposits generally lack the kind of chronological
resolution that is indispensable to advanced historical investigation.
Jedoch, the new instrument for Laser Ablation Inductively
Coupled Mass Spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS), developed by the CCI,
has successfully crossed the old threshold of chronological speciﬁc-
ität. It is crucial for the highly compressed European ice cores.
Whereas standard technologies could make 100 measurements in
1 m of ice core, the new system allows as many as 50,000 messen-
ments in 1 M, meaning that it can detect distinct annual signals,
seasonality, and even storm events in very thin ice layers, wie zum Beispiel
those that typify European glaciers. Daher, the Maine–Harvard
Historical Ice Core Project was able to identify the Black Death’s
arrival in a new core from Switzerland, recovered with our European
collaborators.

While the team members at CCI are using its new technology
to make the most detailed measurements ever conducted on an ice
core, including of lead deposits, the team members at SoHP are as-
sembling the relevant historical and archaeological evidence. Beide
groups come together to analyze the data, synthesize the results,
and write each study. Their precise, sub-annual environmental
measurements—290 measurements for the year 1349 alone—
indubitably reﬂecting the regional conditions in western Europe,
are game-changing. The opening historical study, led by More,
focused on the new measurements of atmospheric deposits of lead
pollution at the Colle Gnifetti glacier in the Swiss Alps that orig-
inated in British mining and ore processing. They depict in graphic
terms how production collapsed in the spring and summer of 1349
as the Black Death devastated the working population. The mea-
surements echo, clarify, and deepen the disparate evidence of
archaeology and written sources (siehe Abbildung 1). This date marked
the only time in the last 2,000 years when atmospherically depos-
ited lead pollution from metal production dropped to undetect-
able levels on this glacier.19

19 Alexander F. More, Nicole E. Spaulding et al., “Next Generation Ice Core Technology
Reveals True Minimum Natural Levels of Lead (Pb) in the Atmosphere: Insights from the
Black Death,” GeoHealth, ICH (2017), 214–216; idem et al., “The Role of Historical Context in
Understanding Past Climate, Pollution and Health Data in Trans-Disciplinary Studies,”
GeoHealth, II (2018), 162–170.

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FR O M H IS T O R Y T O AR C H A E O S C I E N C E

| 17

Feige. 1 Lead Concentration in the Ice Core of Colle Gnifetti

(Schweiz), from Ultra-High-Resolution LA-ICP-MS,
1330–1360 A.D. (Historical Ice Core Project)

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NOTES The average measurements per year from 1349 Zu 1353 Sind 279. The light grey his-
togram represents the declining number of active major mining regions as they were progres-
sively hit by the plague and ceased operations; the dark-striped histogram represents the
number of mining regions resuming metal production, based on written sources. At present,
because no estimates of volume of aggregate metal production are available, the histograms
reﬂect only regions that were active, not the volume of lead produced. Smoothing (black line)
is provided only as a visual aid; the grey plot presents the raw data.
SOURCE Figure and legend adapted from Alexander F. More, Nicole E. Spaulding, et al.,
“Next Generation Ice Core Technology Reveals True Minimum Natural Levels of Lead
(Pb) in the Atmosphere: Insights from the Black Death,” GeoHealth, ICH (2017), 215 (Figur 5,
reproduced with the permission of GeoHealth).

As the Historical Ice Core Project proceeds more deeply into
die Vergangenheit, it is uncovering further environmental data that illumi-
nate economic history, among other areas. Since lead is often
associated geologically with silver, the mining and production of
silver can produce lead, and pollution, as a by-product. Somit, Die
project throws bright new light on the epochal shift of the
seventh-century European economy from the Roman gold
standard to the silver coinage that fueled Europe’s medieval
Wachstum. Some historians have suspected, and others have denied,
that new silver mines drove this major systemic change. The last
decades’ striking archaeological and numismatic discoveries about

18 | M IC H A E L M CC O R MI C K

the new Merovingian and Carolingian lead and silver mines of
central France, at Melle (Deux-Sèvres), directly upwind of Colle
Gnifetti, have not resolved the question. Jetzt, Jedoch, Die
team’s measurements show that lead deposition on that glacier
spiked sharply in just the decades in which seventh-century
Merovingian minters ﬁrst debased the kingdom’s gold coins with
silver, and then again as they shifted outright to purely silver coins,
certainly reﬂecting the expansion of silver production at Melle.
Somit, the new evidence from the Historical Ice Core Project
proves that, in diesem Fall, new silver mining did indeed play a crucial
role in Europe’s shift to the silver standard that prevailed for the
next seven centuries. With other, more distant but more volumi-
nous polar ice cores, the older methods continue to give promising
results at the convergence of environmental and economic history,
elaborated by other interdisciplinary teams of scientists and
humanists as new archaeo-scientiﬁc collaborations spread.20

Perhaps because their disciplinary focus on the material en-
courages recourse to advanced technologies, archaeologists have
preceded humanists in integrating scientiﬁc data about climate into
their studies. A remarkable example of the disruptive power of the
new approaches came from Old World archaeology in 1993,
when Weiss and colleagues published evidence for a severe aridi-
zation event c. 2200 B.C., based on ﬁne soil-depositional patterns
and archaeological indications, linking it with the collapse of the
Akkadian civilization. Subsequent research has discovered this

20 Peter Spufford, Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe (New York, 1988), maintained that
new mines repeatedly played a key role in medieval monetary and economic innovations; Er
wondered about the potential of Melle in this regard (32–33), even though its archaeology was
then unknown. Philip Grierson and Mark Blackburn, Medieval European Coinage (New York,
1986), ICH, 96–97, thought instead that the silver came from recycling conﬁscated silver objects.
Florian Téreygeol, “Y-a-t-il un lien entre la mise en exploitation des mines d’argent de Melle
(Deux-Sèvres) et le passage au monométallisme argent vers 675?” in Luc Bourgeois (Hrsg.),
Wisigoths et francs autour de la bataille de Vouillé, 507 (Saint-Germain-en-Laye, 2010), 251–261,
reconstructed the history of Melle from archaeological and numismatic studies, concluding
from the evidence then available that the Melle discovery did not suddenly cause the shift
to silver coinage. This contention may be true as formulated, but the new ice-core evidence
compellingly indicates that the major new source of silver weighed heavily in the decision to
switch to the new precious metal for the coin of the realm. See Loveluck, McCormick, et al.,
“Alpine Ice-Core Evidence”; Joseph R. McConnell, Andrew I. Wilson, et al., “Lead Pollu-
tion Recorded in Greenland Ice Indicates European Emissions Tracked Plagues, Wars, Und
Imperial Expansion during Antiquity,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, CXV
(2018), 5726–5731.

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| 19

event to have been hemispheric, stretching from Spain to China
via the Indus Valley, even as the initial study alerted scholars to
the potential of abrupt climate change, and the human response
to it, to shape the rise and fall of civilizations.21

New World archaeology has not trailed behind. Although a
possible climate component had been adumbrated as early as 1973,
earth scientists breathed new life into the debate about the collapse
of Classic Maya Civilization (C. 750–1050 C.E.) In 1995, when they
identiﬁed evidence for a mega-drought. Less than a decade later, A
dendrochronologist and a physicist in Cologne worked together to
draw correlations between ﬂuctuating tree-ring growth and his-
torically documented grain-harvest variations in the early modern
era. Collaborating with archaeologists, they used dendrodata to
propose climate-driven changes in grain production during
the Roman Empire as well as during the Linear Pottery Culture
(Linearbandkeramik) of Europe’s ﬁrst farmers (5500–4500 B.C.).22

21 Harvey Weiss, M.-A. Courty, et al., “The Genesis and Collapse of Third Millennium
North Mesopotamian Civilization,” Science, CCLXI (1993), 995–1004. For the differing re-
sponses now evident at three neighboring sites, see Jason Ur, “Urban Adaptations to Climate
Change in Northern Mesopotamia,” in Pernille Bangsgaard, Rachel J. Dann, et al. (Hrsg.),
Climate and Ancient Societies (Copenhagen, 2015), 69–96. The literature linking climate to
the collapse of civilizations is now substantial. Sehen, Zum Beispiel, Malcolm H. Wiener, “The
Interaction of Climate Change and Agency in the Collapse of Civilizations ca. 2300–2000
BC,” Radiocarbon, LVI (2014), S1–S16; for the regions mentioned, Antonio Blanco-González,
Katina T. Lillios, et al., “Cultural, Demographic and Environmental Dynamics of the Copper
and Early Bronze Age in Iberia (3300–1500 BC): Towards an Interregional Multiproxy Com-
parison at the Time of the 4.2 ky BP Event,” Journal of World Prehistory, XXXI (2018), 1–79;
Chun Chang Huang, Jiangli Pang, et al., “Extraordinary Floods Related to the Climatic Event
bei 4200 ka BP on the Qishuihe River, Middle Reaches of the Yellow River, China,” Qua-
ternary Science Reviews, XXX (2011), 460–468 (with further references); Michael Staubwasser,
Frank Sirocko, et al., “Climate Change at the 4.2 ka BP Termination of the Indus Valley
Civilization and Holocene South Asian Monsoon Variability,” Geophysical Research Letters,
XXX (2003), 7–1 to 7–4.
22 David A. Hodell, Jason H. Curtis, et al., “Possible Role of Climate in the Collapse of
Classic Maya Civilization,” Nature, CCCLXXVI (1995), 391–394. For the history of the de-
bate about the collapse of the Maya civilization, see Norman Hammond, “Climate, Crisis,
Collapse, and Ancient Maya Civilization: An Enduring Debate,” in A. Bruce Mainwaring,
Robert Giegengack, et al. (Hrsg.), Climate Crises in Human History (Philadelphia, 2010),
189–196. Burghart Schmidt and Wolfgang Gruhle, “Klimaextreme in römischer Zeit: Eine
Strukturanalyse dendrochronologischer Daten,” Archäologisches Korrespondenzblatt, XXXIII
(2003), 421–426; idem et al., “Globales Auftreten ähnlicher Wuchsmeister von Bäumen–
Homogenitätsanalyse als neues Verfahren für die Dendrochronologie und Klimaforschung,”
Germania, LXXXXIV (2006), 431–465; idem et al., “Klimaextreme in bandkeramischer Zeit
(5300 bis 5000 v. Chr.): Interpretation Dendrochronologischer und Archäologischer
Befunde,” Archäologisches Korrespondenzblatt, XXXIV (2004), 303–307; idem et al., “Mögliche

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20 | M IC H A E L M CC O R MI C K

In 2004, a study of the relationship between Roman archae-
ological features and changing levels of the Dead Sea brought
new data and questions into the developing climate history of
the Levant. In October 2005, a workshop at Harvard University
convened historians, archaeologists, and scientists to brainstorm
about using paleoclimate proxy data more broadly to study pre-
modern economies and societies. In addition to the many ideas
that it generated, the meeting spawned one of the ﬁrst studies to
use an ice core to identify speciﬁc environmental causes of histor-
ical events, in particular the extreme volcanic eruptions that in-
duced harsh winters, crop failures, and political and economic
consequences in Charlemagne’s empire and Byzantium. The inte-
gration of evidence from medieval annals and from ice-core mea-
surements of the acidity deposited by volcanic eruptions—which
were known to block solar radiation and cause sudden downturns
in temperature—revealed a new causal pattern within historical
events for which previously only random environmental conditions
had been visible. Unerwartet, scientiﬁc measurements made in
Greenland in the 1990s helped to explain medieval history. Im
same years, scholars probed more broadly and creatively the cultural
impact and response of indubitable major shifts in climate regime,
such as the late medieval and early modern Little Ice Age.23

Schwankungen von Getreideerträgen—Befunde zur rheinischen Linienbandkeramik und
römischen Kaiserzeit,” ebenda., XXXV (2005), 301–316. I am personally grateful to Burghart
Schmidt for helping me to understand the power of dendrodata for economic history, sowie
as to Thomas Fischer and Joachim Henning for introducing me to him in 2005.
23 The October 2005 workshop owes thanks to the funding provided by a Distinguished
Achievement Award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In addition to Fischer,
Henning, and Schmidt, the participants were Paul Dutton (Geschichte, Simon Fraser Univer-
Stadt),Yizhar Hirschfeld (Archaeology, Hebrew University), Thomas Litt (Palaeontology,
University of Bonn), Mayewski (CCI, University of Maine), Michael B. McElroy (Earth
and Planetary Sciences, Harvard Universität), John Raymond (Harvard–Smithsonian Center
for Astrophysics), Noreen Tuross (Anthropology, Harvard), and Eli Tziperman (Earth and
Planetary Sciences, Harvard). Kyle Harper and Dorian S. Abbot, the two graduate-student
scribes at the time, now have accomplished academic careers.

McCormick, Dutton, et al., “Volcanoes and the Climate Forcing of Carolingian Europe.”
Around the same time, the thoughtful study of Benoît Rossignol and Sébastien Durost—
“Volcanisme global et variations climatiques de courte durée dans l’histoire romaine (Ier s. av.
J.-C.- IVème s. ap. J.-C.): leçons d’une archive glaciaire (GISP2),” Jahrbuch des römisch-
germanischen Zentralmuseums Mainz, LIV (2007), 395–438—proposed links between volcanic sig-
nals in GISP2 and a series of events in Roman history.Wolfgang Behringer, Kulturgeschichte des
Klimas: von der Eiszeit bis zur globalen Erwärmung (München, 2006); idem, Hartmut Lehmann, et al.
(Hrsg.), Kulturelle Konsequenzen der “Kleinen Eiszeit” (Göttingen, 2005).

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| 21

Four Research Trends Throughout the last decade, several
trends have emerged in research integrating scientiﬁc and historical
approaches. The ﬁrst consists of efforts to establish from scientiﬁc
data—buttressed by historical evidence when feasible—the basic
climate characteristics that prevailed at particular moments in
history as a ﬁrst step toward understanding the interaction of cli-
mate change and societal developments. In 2011, an international
climatological team updated what we knew about the Medieval
Climate Anomaly (MCA) and the favorable conditions that charac-
terized Europe’s central Middle Ages. In 2012, a four-year-long
effort by historians and climatologists culminated in the ﬁrst scien-
tiﬁcally grounded reconstruction of changing climate conditions
across the Roman Empire and its successor states, and was pub-
lished in this journal; an update with the latest evidence has just
appeared. Von 2014, the ﬁrst of the regional syntheses of climate
conditions in the Roman sphere heralded in that 2012 study had
become a reality, also appearing in the pages of this journal. Two
years later, a group of climatologists and a few historians produced
a journal special issue that helpfully synthesized the climate history,
and signs of the human response to it or lack thereof, in multiple
Mediterranean regions during selected periods from prehistory to
today.24

In 2016, the disruptive power of new scientiﬁc measurements
showed itself again, identifying a new late antique Little Ice Age in

24 Elena Xoplaki, Dominik Fleitmann, et al. (Hrsg.), “Medieval Climate Anomaly,” Pages
News, XIX (2011), 1–39; McCormick, Büntgen, et al., “Climate Change during and after
the Roman Empire,” updated by Harper and McCormick as “Reconstructing the Roman
Climate,” in Walter Scheidel (Hrsg.), The Science of Roman History: Biology, Climate, und das
Future of the Past (Princeton, 2018), 11–52. See also the relevant chapters in William V. Harris
(Hrsg.), The Ancient Mediterranean Environment between Science and History (Leiden, 2013). Haldon,
Roberts, et al., “The Climate and Environment of Byzantine Anatolia”; Karin Holmgren,
Alexandra Gogou, et al., “Mediterranean Holocene Climate, Environment and Human So-
cieties,” Quaternary Science Reviews, CXXXVI (2016), 1–4, introducing studies of France,
Albania, Sicily, Greece, and Anatolia and the Levant. Among them are Adam Izdebski, Jordanien
Pickett, et al., “The Environmental, Archaeological and Historical Evidence for Regional Cli-
matic Changes and Their Societal Impacts in the Eastern Mediterranean in Late Antiquity,”
ibid., 189–208. They develop a chronology that differs considerably from that proposed by
McCormick, Büntgen et al., “Climate Change during and after the Roman Empire,” for
what they contend were late antique drought and wet periods common to Anatolia and
the Levant. More and better proxy evidence will be needed to resolve this important question.
Xoplaki, Fleitmann et al., “The Medieval Climate Anomaly and Byzantium: A Review of
the Evidence on Climatic Fluctuations, Economic Performance and Societal Change,” ebenda.,
229–252, offer a valuable synthesis for the northeastern Mediterranean region.

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22 | M IC H A E L M CC O R MI C K

which average summer temperatures dropped markedly across
western Eurasia from 536 to c. 660/680. The newly observed
conditions invite deeper investigation of potential links between
this rapid climate change and the far-reaching societal reorganiza-
tions underway in those years, when the Roman Empire’s recon-
quest of its western provinces ground to a halt and the migrations
of the Slavs, Avars, and Arabs began.25

Eine Sekunde, most likely short-lived, trend arose as alert histo-
rians quickly brought the new proxy data deriving from paleocli-
mate science together with historical evidence to propose bold
new explanations for major historical developments. In 2009,
Bulliett consulted Near Eastern chronicles and Chinese tree rings
to argue that an anomalous Siberian High obtruded over Iran in
the tenth and eleventh centuries, ruining cotton production and
creating difﬁculties for camel-dependent populations. The upshot
was a series of economic and political collapses. Deeper scrutiny,
Jedoch, has come to challenge that perspective, ﬁnding the cli-
mate evidence to be weak and the historical evidence to indicate a
different chronology and the predominance of political and mili-
tary causes. In 2012, Ellenblum formulated a bold thesis that cli-
mate change drove wide-ranging historical change across the
eastern Mediterranean. Whatever the fate of some of his more
sweeping claims, the striking, and hitherto unnoticed, simultaneity
of many of the key developments tracked in his book is not to be
denied.26

A third trend concerns the syntheses that exploit historical as
well as scientiﬁc evidence to re-situate broad swaths of human his-
tory in a new environmental matrix. Fagan’s early surveys performed
a signal service by introducing the cultivated public to a compelling
vision of historical climate change. Brooke’s 2014 Climate Change and
the Course of Human History offers a good point of entry for humanists
eager to immerse themselves in the evolving integration of scientiﬁc

25 Büntgen, Vladimir S. Myglan, et al., “Cooling and Societal Change during the Late
Antique Little Ice Age from 536 to around 660 AD,” Nature Geoscience, IX (2016), 231–236.
26 Richard W. Bulliet, Cotton, Climate, and Camels in Early Islamic Iran: A Moment in World
Geschichte (New York, 2009); Deborah G. Tor, “The Eclipse of Khurāsān in the Twelfth
Jahrhundert,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, LXXXI (2018), 1–26; Ellenblum,
The Collapse of the Eastern Mediterranean: Climate Change and the Decline of the East, 950–1072
(New York, 2012). See Sam White’s judicious appraisal in his review of Ellenblum’s book in
Mediterranean Historical Review, XXVIII (2013), 70–72.

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| 23

and historical climate approaches. It connects a conscientious study of
recent paleoclimate science with an overarching trajectory of human
development from its origins in Africa to its current stage in the world
of the twenty-ﬁrst century. Unavoidably, today’s supercharged prog-
ress in paleoclimatic investigation already dates some of the scientiﬁc
components of Brooke’s discussion. But his fusion of science and his-
tory, unter anderem, encourages a view of human history and
climate change in the stark terms of two epochs. In the immensely
long ﬁrst epoch, the human response to the environment was limited
to the voluntary migration and involuntary genetic change of small
groups of hominins; people were trapped, went extinct, or evolved
to spread new genetic features through founders’ effects in resurgent
micro-populations. The second, briefer epoch of human history and
cultural resilience, in which we live now, is characterized by the
march of technologies—shelter, Kleidung, heating, etc.—that can mit-
igate climate change to one extent or another.27

As this vision of two epochs suggests, scientiﬁcally informed
climate history provides new alternatives for arranging our think-
ing about how the human experience unfolded over time. Period-
ization is a blunt but useful tool for organizing our knowledge of
die Vergangenheit. Beyond the dynasties and the political, wirtschaftlich, Und
cultural structures that have underpinned existing schemes, paleo-
climate science offers benchmarks of change derived from
completely independent evidence, to lay alongside those that have
already been adopted with success.

Giving priority to particular intervals of climate change makes
obvious sense for historical studies that focus on climate, wie zum Beispiel
Le Roy Ladurie’s “human and comparative history of the cli-
mate.” But the approach also suits broader agendas. Broodbank
structured the tabular synopsis of his magniﬁcent Making of the
Middle Sea in terms of climate phases from 2 million B.P. Zu 500 B.C.
Climate phases head two of his ﬁrst three chronological tables, Und

27 Brian M. Fagan, The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization (New York, 2004);
idem, The Great Warming: Climate Change and The Rise and Fall of Civilizations (New York,
2008). The scientiﬁc information in these two works is now dated. Brooke, Climate Change
and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey (New York, 2014). See Harper’s review essay
on Brooke’s book, “Civilization, Climate and Malthus,” and the ensuing dialogue between
Harper and Brooke in this journal—Brooke, “Malthus and the North Atlantic Oscillation: A
Reply to Kyle Harper”; Harper, “A Reply to John L. Brooke’s ‘Malthus and the North
Atlantic Oscillation,’” XLVI (2016), 563–584.

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24 | M IC H A E L M CC O R MI C K
climate shifts set the pace for Chapters 3 Und 4. Ähnlich, Harper’s
recent assessment of the fall of the Roman Empire not only lends a
prominent place to environmental change but also features a time-
line in which simpliﬁed Roman climate history tops the graphic
overview. Some scholars have gone even farther in fusing climate
change with more traditional political periodization—for instance,
by linking explicitly the dynastic changes that scan China’s history
with cooling periods.28

A fourth trend discloses itself as a sign of a maturing trans-
disciplinary impulse. The most recent work makes room for
informed exploitation of paleoclimate science. dennoch, Es
generally eschews a deterministic view of the interaction between
climate change and human civilization, whether the theme is the
end of the medieval economy, uprising in Ottoman Anatolia,
European colonization of North America, or the global history
of the seventeenth century. More positively formulated, Dieser Trend
emphasizes the role of societal resilience in the face of environ-
mental change. Already in 1980, de Vries delved into quantifying
human responses that limited the economic impact of early mod-
ern short-term climate variation. A more recent argument is that
shipping systematically buffered the Roman economy from the
droughts to which the Meditereanean was prone, creating a virtual
“water trade” by moving food production from well-watered zones
to more arid ones. A similar argument about the medieval move-
ment of preserved ﬁsh from the North Sea and Baltic into other
areas of Europe appears apropos. At least since Pettersson’s early
arbeiten, studies about the rise of the herring and cod industries, nicht
least those of the Hanseatic League cities, have tended to include
mentions of the environmentally driven migrations of these ﬁsh.
Trotzdem, careful archaeological investigation underscores the
resilient social response to climate, revealing that technological
advances and shifts in the historical infrastructure of supply and

28 Le Roy Ladurie, Histoire humaine et comparée du climat (Paris, 2004), 2 v. For the tables, sehen
Cyprian Broodbank, Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning
to the Emergence of the Classical World (New York, 2013), 10–13. The titles of Chapters 3 Und 4
are “The Speciating Sea (1.8 Million To 50,000 Years Ago)” and “A Cold Coming We Had
of It (50,000–10,000 BC)” (Pleistocene climate, 88–91). Harper, The Fate of Rome: Climate,
Krankheit, and the End of an Empire (Princeton, 2017), xii–xiii; David D. Zhang, Chi Yung Jim,
et al., “Climatic Change, Wars and Dynastic Cycles in China over the Last Millennium,”
Climatic Change, LXXVI (2006), 459–477.

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| 25

demand can trump raw climate change and the migration trajec-
tories of spawning grounds in the earliest rise of the North Sea
herring industry.29

Like the incipient debate about the Siberian High and medi-
eval cotton production, this fourth trend also insists on a critical
and measured approach in weighing the potential impact of
weather events against other factors. Zum Beispiel, the study of fos-
silized pollens has led to a modulated appraisal of the part that
changes in precipitation played in the changing rural economies
of late antique Anatolia. Similarly informed and critical discussion
has centered on the role of climate events in the withdrawal of
Mongols from their invasion of thirteenth-century Hungary.30

Climate and Disease That critical approach entails recognition
of when the appeal to climatic causes appears plausible but still
imperfectly resolved. The perennial question of how climate change
connects with disease regimes attracted a certain skepticism in
1980. Recently the search for climate triggers of major disease out-
breaks, especially in antiquity, has intensiﬁed as scholars, Manchmal

29 Bruce M. S. Campbell, The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late Me-
dieval World (New York, 2016); White, The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman
Empire (New York, 2011); idem, A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europeʼs Encounter with
Nordamerika (Cambridge, Masse., 2017); Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: Krieg, Climate Change
and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, 2013); de Vries, “Measuring the Im-
pact of Climate on History: The Search for Appropriate Methodologies,” in the special issue,
“History and Climate,” 599–630. For the “water trade,” see, Zum Beispiel, Brian J. Dermody,
R. P. H. van Beek, et al., “A Virtual Water Network of the Roman World,” Hydrology and
Earth Systems Science, XVIII (2014), 5025–5040. Pettersson, Climatic Variations in Historic and
Prehistoric Time. For the climate and biological factors affecting the cycles of the Bohuslän
ﬁshery, see Carsten Jahnke, Das Silber des Meeres: Fang und Vertrieb von Ostseehering zwischen
Norwegen und Italien (12.–16. Jahrhundert) (Köln, 2000), 282–283. James H. Barrett, Alison
M. Locker, et al., “The Origins of Intensive Marine Fishing in Medieval Europe: The English
Beweis,” Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, CCLXXI (2004), 2417–2421; idem
et al., “‘Dark Age Economics’ Revisited: The English Fish Bone Evidence AD 600–1600,”
Antiquity, LXXVIII (2004), 618–636; Barrett, Cluny Johnstone, et al., “Detecting the Medi-
eval Cod Trade: A New Method and First Results,” Journal of Archaeological Science, XXXV
(2008), 850–861.
Izdebski, “Why Did Agriculture Flourish in the Late Antique East? The Role of Climate
30
Fluctuations in the Development and Contraction of Agriculture in Asia Minor and the Mid-
dle East from the 4th till the 7th c. AD,” Millennium. Jahrbuch zu Kultur und Geschichte des ersten
Jahrtausends n. Chr., VIII (2011), 291–312; idem, A Rural Economy in Transition: Asia Minor from
Late Antiquity into the Early Middle Ages ( Warsaw, 2013); Büntgen and Di Cosmo, “Climatic
and Environmental Aspects of the Mongol Withdrawal from Hungary in 1242 CE,” Scientiﬁc
Reports, VI (2016), 25606; Zsolt Pinke, László Ferenczi, et al., “Climate of Doubt: A Re-
Evaluation of Büntgen and Di Cosmo’s Environmental Hypothesis for the Mongol With-
drawal from Hungary, 1242 CE,” ebenda., VII (2017), 12695.

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26 | M IC H A E L M CC O R MI C K

begrudgingly, start to recognize the profound consequences of dis-
ease outbreaks. Conditions favoring Yersinia pestis and the bubonic
plague in the Justinianic Pandemic (541-C. 750) and the Black Death
and Second Pandemic (1347–1772) have been of particular interest.
Epidemiologists and historians have long noted the temperature and
humidity that favor or hinder the rodent hosts and insect vectors of
plague, and they continue to seek the speciﬁc environmental con-
ditions that could have precipitated, sustained, or ended speciﬁc
outbreaks or the broader sequences of outbreaks that continued
for centuries.31

Leaving aside such general conditions as the frailty of human
populations as a result of earlier nutrition crises inﬂicted by climate
or other disruptions, some epidemiological and epizootic patterns
seem to shed indirect light on the speciﬁc conditions leading to
outbreaks of plague. Zum Beispiel, more precipitation often allows a
trophic cascade, das ist, increased food availability up and down the
food chain of disease hosts, fostering a population explosion that ulti-
mately stresses a host population as resources fail to keep up with de-
mand, and opens the stressed host population to disease crises. More
intricate scenarios have also been advanced—for instance, a sequence
of precipitation-induced trophic cascades followed by drought and
concomitant stress, as observed among North American hosts of
endemic plague. Noch, however much a general connection between
changing climate patterns and epidemic disease seems plausible, Die
details of the complex potential climate/host/vector mechanisms
have so far escaped unambiguous identiﬁcation and resolution.32
Climate and Settlement Patterns Climate data also promise
sharp new insights about the long-term shifts in settlement patterns

31 Andrew B. Appleby, “Epidemics and Famine in the Little Ice Age,” in the special issue,
“History and Climate,” 643–663; McCormick, “Tracking Mass Death during the Fall of
Rome’s Empire (ICH),” Journal of Roman Archaeology, XXVIII (2015), 326–328.
32 Lei Xu, Leif C. Stige, et al., “Wet Climate and Transportation Routes Accelerate Spread
of Human Plague,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, CCLXXXI
(2014), 20133159; Robert R. Parmenter, Ekta P. Yadav, et al., “Incidence of Plague Associ-
ated with Increased Winter-Spring Precipitation in New Mexico,” American Journal of Tropical
Medicine and Hygiene, LXI (1999), 814–821; Boris V. Schmid, Büntgen, et al., “Climate-Driven
Introduction of the Black Death and Successive Plague Reintroductions into Europe,” Proceed-
ings of the National Academy of Sciences, CXII (2015), 3020–3025; Lei Xu, Schmid, et al., “The
Trophic Responses of Two Different Rodent–Vector–Plague Systems to Climate Change,”
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, CCLXXXII (2015), 20141846.
David A. Eads and Dean E. Biggins, “Paltry Past-Precipitation: Predisposing Prairie Dogs to
Plague?” Journal of Wildlife Management, LXXXI (2017), 990–998.

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FR O M H IS T O R Y T O AR C H A E O S C I E N C E

| 27

that are essential to understanding land use and economic organi-
zation. Unexplained movements of settlement locations to higher
or lower places could well be a fruitful area of environmental ar-
chaeological investigation. Could some of these movements be
connected with recently identiﬁed multidecadal shifts in precipita-
tion that affect water tables? As precipitation declined, zum Beispiel,
dropping sub-surface water tables will have made wells run dry,
forcing settlements either to dig deeper wells or to move downhill
to reach the new water table. Umgekehrt, periods of increased
precipitation could have encouraged settlements to move upward,
away from excessively wet sites. Just such a scenario arose in late
medieval Hungary. A quantitative evaluation of archaeologically
detected lowland settlement patterns over 600 years shows that
during the drier and warmer Medieval Climate Anomaly, settle-
ments were situated signiﬁcantly lower than during the wetter
and cooler late Middle Ages (C. 1250–1550) and the changed
conditions of the Little Ice Age.

The sudden onset of moister conditions in the thirteenth cen-
tury led to permanent structural transformations in settlement pat-
terns and the rural economy embedded in them, not to mention
massive internal migration. Letzten Endes, the region’s rich ﬂood-fed
grass promoted ﬁfteenth-century Hungary into a major supplier of
cattle to Europe. As this example and so many others suggest, Die
expanding integration of science into the study of the human past
is forging a broad new discipline that deepens and sometimes
disrupts our established historical wisdom.33

The Future of Archaeoscience The course of the future is unmis-
takable. Multiple investigators with diverse competences in climate
Wissenschaft, Geschichte, and archaeology must continue to collaborate. Nur
as no lone archaeologist would seriously contemplate excavating
even a small site, so must historians engage in teamwork to exploit
the promise of the new methods to their fullest extent. Our tradi-
tional historical sources gain new life in dialogue with new data
and new questions.

(One academic red herring is worth mentioning in this re-
gard. Historians sometimes worry that multiple authorship will

33 For precipitation and settlement, sehen, Zum Beispiel, McCormick, Büntgen, et al., “Climate
Change during and after the Roman Empire,” 206; Pinke, Ferenczi, et al., “Settlement Pat-
terns as Indicators of Water Level Rising? Case Study on the Wetlands of the Great Hungarian
Plain,” Quaternary International, CDXV (2016), 204–215; idem et al., “Zonal Assessment.”

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28 | M IC H A E L M CC O R MI C K
compromise young scholars’ promotion: How will committees
know who wrote what in multi-authored studies? This is a false
dilemma. Everyday great universities grant tenure to brilliant indi-
vidual scientists who have never published a single paper alone,
and the Nobel Prize committees have no trouble understanding
the rules governing the hierarchy of contributors to the articles
in most of the major peer-reviewed publications.)

The most fruitful collaborations do not arise ex post facto.
Scientists should not approach historians only when they en-
counter problems that they cannot solve themselves, and histo-
rians should not approach climate scientists with questions only
after the collection and analysis of data are done. As in archae-
ology, so in archaeoscience: The most productive collaborations
begin as early as possible, in the conception, birth, and execu-
tion of a project.

It is easier to exploit proxy evidence in which the basic fea-
tures, such as nature, chronology, signiﬁcance, and robustness of
the signals, are already well established, but inquiry is far more
fruitful when historians, archaeologists, and scientists come together
before the evidence is collected to formulate questions and strate-
gies. My own research has progressed from an initial use of existing
measurements from the Greenland ice core produced by Paul
Mayewski’s team during the 1990s in the GISP2 expedition to an
active participation in the more recent innovative and ongoing
work of the Historical Ice Core Project, which Mayewski, Dietmar
Wagenbach, and I conceived in 2013. The Project includes all
manner of fact ﬁnding, from the retrieval and measurement of
chemical species to the comparison of data with the historical and
archaeological records. Beneﬁting from our European colleagues’
expertise on the Swiss glacier, we enlisted CCI’s scientists, with their
state-of-the-art technology, and Harvard University’s community
of historians, archaeologists, and scientists. Our team’s members
range from the most senior professors to undergraduates and other
interested parties.34

34 For a detailed discussion of the value of collaborative effort before the collection of ev-
idence, see Izdebski, Holmgren, et al., “Realising Consilience: How Better Communication
between Archaeologists, Historians and Natural Scientists Can Transform the Study of Past
Climate Change in the Mediterranean,” Quaternary Science Reviews, CXXXVI (2016), 5–22.
The Historical Ice Core Project has the generous support of Arcadia, a charitable fund of
Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.

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FR O M H IS T O R Y T O AR C H A E O S C I E N C E

| 29

A key element in the birthing of such an integrative enterprise
is that the climate scientists, Historiker, and archaeologists involved
learn to speak each other’s “language” and to appraise the strengths
and weaknesses of methods, Instrumente, and data that may never
have been part of their toolkits before. Today’s scientiﬁc-historical
revolution demands that young researchers be exposed to new dis-
ciplinary frontiers. Humanists and scientists alike, whatever their
professional status, usually welcome with open arms the opportu-
nity to contribute directly to the creation of new scientiﬁc and
historical knowledge.

Technological advances, such as CCI’s LA-ICP-MS and next-
generation sequencing in archaeogenetics, are producing amazing
new evidence. But establishing new transdisciplinary investigations
requires more than technology, Wille, and resources; it also requires
new platforms that can unite humanists and scientists for the long
haul. Archaeology departments and institutes around the world
have been developing them more or less on an ad hoc basis for
some time: the programs at the University of Oxford’s venerable
Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art
(1955), the University of Cambridge’s McDonald Institute for
Archaeological Research (1990), the Weizmann Institute’s Kimmel
Center for Archaeological Science at (1997), the University of
Arizona’s program in archaeological sciences (2002), Arizona State
University’s School of Human Evolution and Social Change
(2005), and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human
Geschichte (2014), to name just some of those that are active in his-
torical periods. Less expensive but high-performing nonetheless
are the research networks that ensure continuous interaction,
collective programs, and close cooperation within universities
between different individuals, research groups, and laboratories,
such as Harvard University’s Initiative for the Science of the
Human Past (2011). Innovative programs combine existing insti-
tutions and networks with complementary strengths in coordi-
nated research programs and university education. Thanks to the
low cost of digital conferencing and communications, they can
even bridge oceans, as does the new Max Planck–Harvard Research
Center for the Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterranean
(https://www.archaeoscience.org/). The interdisciplinary investi-
gation of ancient climates has found a place in most of these new
platforms.

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30 | M IC H A E L M CC O R MI C K
The new scientiﬁc climate history is about more than just the
history of climate. As noted at the outset, the new history of cli-
mate is developing in a new climate of history; it forms one of
several leading edges in archaeoscience, the broader transdisciplin-
ary convergence that brings the power of science to bear on the
human past. Along with the emergence of archaeogenetics, mo-
lecular archaeology, and digital humanities—such as geographical
information systems (GIS) and computational philology (quantita-
tive studies of textual authorship)—climate history is in the process
of achieving the long-imagined re-uniﬁcation of the sciences and
the humanities as it unveils historical changes in the environment.
In this great venture, the Journal of Interdisciplinary History will
continue to play a signal role.

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3 Zeitschrift für interdisziplinäre Geschichte, L:1 (Sommer, 2019), 3–30. Bild

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