Historical Climatology

The authors suggest to view the origins of Islam against the background of the 6th century AD Arabian socio-ecological crisis whose model is specified in the paper through the study of climatological, seismological, volcanological and epidemiological history of the period. Most socio-political systems of the Arabs reacted to the socio-ecological crisis by getting rid of the rigid supra- tribal political structures (kingdoms and chiefdoms) which started posing a real threat to their very survival. The decades of fighting which led to the destruction of most of the Arabian kingdoms and chiefdoms (reflected in Ayyãm al- 'Arab tradition) led to the elaboration of some definite "anti- royal" freedom-loving tribal ethos. At the beginning of the 7th century tribes which would recog- nise themselves as subjects of some terrestrial super-tribal political authority, the "king", risked to lose its honour. However, this seems not to be applicable to the authority of another type, the "ce- lestial" one. At the meantime the early 7th century evidences the merging of the Arabian tradition of prophecy and the Arabian Monotheist "Rahmanist" tradition which produced "the Arabian pro- phetic movement". The Monotheist "Rahmanist" prophets appear to have represented a supratribal authority just of the type many Arab tribes were looking for at this very time, which seems to ex- plain to a certain extent those prophets' political success (including the extreme political success of Muhammad).

I prepared this poster for the third VICS (PAGES Volcanic Impacts on Climate and Society) meeting in Tucson, Arizona. It describes the geology of Iceland, the consequences of the 1783 Laki fissure eruption (Lakagígar) on the northern hemisphere as well as the extraordinary phenomena that could be observed in Europe following the eruption. The poster also explores what consequences the eruption had on North America, mainly exceptionally cold winters that set many records. The poster concludes with open research questions for future archival research in American and Canadian archives.

A presente investigação tem como objecto de estudo as preces e procissões para pedir chuva (Pro Pluvia) ou a serenidade do tempo (Pro Serenitate) celebradas nas cidades do Porto e de Braga (NW de Portugal), ao longo do século XVIII. Com base neste tipo de manifestações religiosas e após avaliarmos o seu significado e valor climático/meteorológico, apresentaremos uma aproximação ao tema das variações climáticas e dos extremos meteorológicos, no período anterior à criação da rede organizada de estações meteorológicas e à sistematização das observações instrumentais em território português, o que só acontece após a criação do Observatório Meteorológico do Infante D. Luís, em Lisboa, em meados do século XIX.

Precipitation levels in southern Africa exhibit a marked east–west gradient and are characterized by strong seasonality and high interannual variability. Much of the mainland south of 15°S exhibits a semiarid to dry subhumid climate. More than 66 percent of rainfall in the extreme southwest of the subcontinent occurs between April and September. Rainfall in this region—termed the winter rainfall zone (WRZ)—is most commonly associated with the passage of midlatitude frontal systems embedded in the austral westerlies. In contrast, more than 66 percent of mean annual precipitation over much of the remainder of the subcontinent falls between October and March. Climates in this summer rainfall zone (SRZ) are dictated by the seasonal interplay between subtropical high-pressure systems and the migration of easterly flows associated with the Intertropical Convergence Zone. Fluctuations in both SRZ and WRZ rainfall are linked to the variability of sea-surface temperatures in the oceans surrounding southern Africa and are modulated by the interplay of large-scale modes of climate variability, including the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), Southern Indian Ocean Dipole, and Southern Annular Mode. Ideas about long-term rainfall variability in southern Africa have shifted over time. During the early to mid-19th century, the prevailing narrative was that the climate was progressively desiccating. By the late 19th to early 20th century, when gauged precipitation data became more readily available, debate shifted toward the identification of cyclical rainfall variation. The integration of gauge data, evidence from historical documents, and information from natural proxies such as tree rings during the late 20th and early 21st centuries, has allowed the nature of precipitation variability since ~1800 to be more fully explored.

This book chapter, co-authored with Christian Pfister, is a review of historical climatology which discuses problems of impact research and the relevance of the Anthropocene hypothesis (P. Crutzen and others) for the understanding of climate history. We suggest that the future of historical climatology will be to include the climate history of the 19th and 20th centuries. - An English translation of this text will appear in the near future.

The term petit âge de glace (PAG) is the literal translation of the English 'Little Ice Age' (LIA). During the past 20 years, the Little Ice Age has emerged as a topic of major research focus spanning such fields as paleoecology, environmental history and climate history (Fig. 1). Despite its widespread usage, no formal definition exists and the term is characterized by a number of ambiguities. Firstly, the Little Ice Age (LIA) was initially used to describe the late 19 th century AD and the glacial floods that impacted the main mountain ranges of both Europe and North America (MATTHEWS and BRIFFA, 2005; WOODWORD, 2014). It was only later that the term was extended to encompass a longer period corresponding to a cold phase in Europe and North America, expressed, for instance, by the expansion of glaciers (LAMBS, 1965; LEROY‑LADURIE, 1967). Although the term was initially used to describe a process, it has gradually acquired a chronological meaning, which has posed some diffi...

Private diaries provide a fairly unique set of materials within climate change research in that they provide information both on past climate variability and on the ways that people live within, and interact with, climate. The fact that the observations within them are affected as much by personal experience as by physical conditions can render the derivation of robust climatic data problematic, and a number of techniques have been developed to generate quantitative or semi-quantitative information from them. These include frequency counts of binary meteorological phenomena such as days with/without precipitation, content analysis techniques, proxies such as grain harvest dates, and statistical techniques that assume of some degree of continuity between the reconstruction period and the present day. The latter approaches can provide the most robust data, but can preclude direct comparison between past and present climates. Some studies attempt to increase reliability through comparison with other contemporaneous reconstructions, but this can create a potential for circular reasoning. As ethnographies, the methodological issues are less challenging. Most were highly personal documents and not intended for publication; diaries can therefore represent ‘pure’ ethnographies, representing an unbiased account of individuals’ interactions with the ‘weather world’ and, in some cases, the ways that weather informed the character they presented to the world. Diaries can therefore exemplify individuals’ highly personal engagement with weather and climate, reflective of a myriad of a number of social, cultural, political and scientific narratives. Their use in climate research can therefore provide important contributions to current debates.

The projected rise of extreme climate events has sparked fresh interest in how past societies handled similar challenges. However, while historical experiences of famine, migration, and ‘collapse’ act as silent referents to the current debate, few of these imaginaries are actually based on empirical studies. This book explores the European climate anomaly of the 1770s to study the dynamic interplay of environmental and social factors in ‘close-up’. It develops a dedicated socionatural approach to capture the entanglement of climate and culture and introduces a small-scale, high-resolution design. Methodologically it suggests a concept of socioecological vulnerability to study the way past societies have ‘socialized’ climate anomalies.
The decade at the centre of the book marks a spike of the Little Ice Age. During the anomaly of the 1770s a persistent cold/wet-complex struck European societies already weakened by social disparity, political fragility and economic transformation. The disastrous combination of climatic and cultural factors resulted in a ‘twinned catastrophe’. It escalated a string of poor harvests into a severe famine that impacted all of Europe and – through the spread of epidemics and epizootics – claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. The book uses a series of carefully situated case-studies to trace the human-environment-interactions of the crisis period through various societal fields. These close-ups illustrate how the socionatural extreme encouraged and legitimised mass-migration, antisemitism and virulent proto-nationalism. At the same time they reveal how the crisis fostered political reform, new scientific fields and early humanitarianism.
The book captures a fragile socioecological setting. It reconstructs the biophysical impacts by connecting the various ‘archives of nature’ and the ‘archives of society’, and places them within the Little Ice Age framework (Ch. 1+2). It then ties these inputs to the increasingly vulnerable socioecological arrangements of Europe’s historical ‘grain societies’ at the end of the Ancient Regime. Ch. 3 looks at the way the crisis was perceived. It charts how in the ‘laboratory’ situation of the crises, competing religious, natural or social interpretations informed and prefigured the physical responses available. Ch. 4 studies the wealth of contemporary practices. Case-studies at local level reveal how the crisis encouraged new forms of self-help and strategic migration. At regional level it initiated empowering interactions between sovereigns and subjects that initiated forms of ‘state-building-by-catastrophe’. In the wider realm of politics the famine legitimised power politics such as the Partition of Poland, while in the fields of science new groups of experts used the extreme weather to establish novel disciplinary fields (from public medicine and agronomy to meteorology). Ch. 5 analyses how the affected societies coped long-term. It studies material culture to reveal the highly selective way extreme socionatural events were memorised or forgotten, and argues that these processes framed the societal capacities for ecological adaptation.
The socionatural scope of the book not only challenges the various forms of social and climatic determinism. It also connects historical developments previously explored only in national/political settings – linking the protests of the Steelboys in Ireland with the absolutist coup in Sweden and the school reforms in Saxony. The socionatural close-up of the book reveals both the plurality of and the limitations to human responses. It suggests that more dynamic connections of climate and culture are both necessary and feasible.

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Am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts durchlebte Europa, im Zuge einer extremen Klimaanomalie der Kleinen Eiszeit eine der schwersten Hungerkrisen seiner Geschichte. Das fatale Zusammenspiel von Klima und Kultur machte sie zur »doppelten« Katastrophe. Ihre Auswirkungen erfassten den gesamten Kontinent und kosteten hunderttausende Menschen das Leben. Die Krise beförderte neben Ausgrenzung, Auswanderung und Antisemitismus aber auch politische Reformen, Humanitarismus und neue Wissenschaften. Das Buch zeigt am Beispiel dieses Ereignisses, wie frühere Gesellschaften Witterungsextreme bewältigten und wie vielfältig Klimaimpulse »sozialisiert« werden konnten. Dominik Collet plädiert für einen integrativen, sozionaturalen Zugang zur Geschichte. Es erzählt eine Verflechtungsgeschichte von Mensch und Umwelt, in der kurzfristige Ereignisse und langfristige, sozioökologische Strukturen eng miteinander verkoppelt sind. Daher offenbart der Blick auf die Hungersnot schlaglichtartig grundlegende ökonomische und ökologische Problemlagen der Gesellschaften des 18. Jahrhunderts. In diesem Umfeld erweisen sich vermeintliche Naturkatastrophen immer auch als Kulturkatastrophen. Die Studie stellt deterministische Zugänge in Frage und zeigt, dass eine dynamische Perspektive auf das Zusammenwirken von Klima und Kultur ebenso notwendig wie praktikabel ist. Sie regt dazu an, die Natur nicht länger als Gegenteil, sondern als Teil der Geschichte zu begreifen.

The role of climate variability in pre-colonial southern African history is highly disputed. We here provide a synthesis and critique of climate-society discourses relating to two regionally defining periods of state formation and disaggregation. The first period involves the eleventh-thirteenth century development of socio-political complexity and the rise of southern Africa’s first state, Mapungubwe, followed by its collapse and the shift in regional power to Great Zimbabwe. The later period encompasses the early-nineteenth century difaqane/mfecane mass migrations, violence and ensuing state-building activity. To further our assessment, we consider the wider contentious issues of climate causation and determinism in a regional context, but dispute suggestions of paradigm shift towards simplistic environmental collapse. Nevertheless, we specifically point to ambiguities in palaeoclimate records, a narrative tendency toward monocausal explanations, and a lack of integration among the literature as reasons for a sustained divergence in interpretation regarding the significance of climate. We move on to discuss the potential of integrative approaches to illuminate understanding of the complex interactions between past climate variability and human activity. In order to do so, we highlight interlinked concepts such as vulnerability and resilience as key for bridging the gap between the natural and social sciences. To conclude, we point to future climate-society priorities and ways forward in the form of research areas, data prospects and questions.

Le connessioni tra quadri ambientali e fenomeni economici hanno visto di recente un crescente interesse. In un campo connotato da un così forte carattere interdisciplinare sono varie le difficoltà che si incontrano, non solo nello scambio di conoscenze, ma anche nella stessa impostazione delle ricerche. Ambiente, clima, biologia, ecosistemi sono terreni di studio su cui convergono varie discipline, che richiedono un fondamentale chiarimento delle diverse prospettive di conoscenza e dei rispettivi presupposti, senza dei quali si rimane inevitabilmente immersi in una specie di “babele” di linguaggi in cui non sempre è facile districarsi. Il testo intende portare un contributo nell'ambito della storia ambientale e climatica del Medioevo; e costituisce una rielaborazione della relazione tenuta e discussa in occasione del Convegno internazionale del Centro Italiano di Studi di Storia e Arte di Pistoia (2015) sul tema "La crescita economica dell'Occidente medievale. Un tema storico non ancora esaurito".

In the “calamitous” 14th century, as Barbara Tuchman called it in her classic „A Distant Mirror“ (1978) , the medieval world entered a period of severe crisis in demography, economy, politics and religion. This crisis took hold in all regions, ranging from China in the East to England in the West. Even before the catastrophic pandemic of the Black Death (1346-1352), deteriorating climatic conditions had ended the period of demographic and economic expansion that began in the 10th century.
The local and regional impacts and consequences of these general potentially crisis-laden conditions may have differed; outcomes ranged from actual societal collapse to the emergence of powerful new polities – while Byzantium´s power dwindled away, Hungary entered a period of strong rulership and external power in the reign of Louis I of Anjou (1342-1382), for instance. But these conditions provide a framework for global perspective on this period and allow us to use the 14th century-crisis as a field of “natural experiments of history”, as Jared Diamond and James A. Robinson have called them ; accordingly, we analyse how similar crisis phenomena influenced the development of societies with different (or similar) traditions, religions, institutions, geographies or ecologies.
In order to be able to capture the local variations and complexities, we adopt concepts and tools provided by the field of complexity science. Mono-causal or linear explanations are inadequate for the analysis and the description of crisis, transformation or collapse of pre-modern polities. Within this framework, complex systems are understood as large networks of individual components, whose interactions at the microscopic level produce “complex” changing patterns of behaviour of the whole system on the macroscopic level. In the last decades, historians and social scientists who became interested in complexity theory tried to use its concepts and terminology for the conceptualisation and description of phenomena in their own fields, but often only in a “metaphoric” way. Less frequently, though, historians have tried to make use of the mathematical foundations of complexity theory or of quantitative tools provided by this field. Recent scholarship has implemented some of these tools especially for the construction of macro-models of socio-economic development. While these studies help us construct analytical tools for the macro-level of our own research, they run the same risk as earlier scholarship of neglecting complex variations at the local and regional levels.
Therefore, we combine complexity theory with the analytical framework of „systems theory“ developed by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann in order to capture the interveawements between politics, economy and religion within a polity and with the political, economic and ecological environment. In addition, we employ the methods and tools of network analysis, which allow us to capture, analyse and model linkages and cause-effect correlations in society, economy, politics and religion on the macro- and micro-level down to groups and individuals.
Overall, as a complement to earlier studies our analytical
approach shall allow us to capture the “diversité véritable” of our period without losing track of essential commonalities (the “strange parallels”, as Victor Liebermann has called them in his remarkable study on Southeast Asia in Global Context, 2009 ) of this “first world crisis” across all cultures and societies. The scientic value of this approach will be demonstrated for some specific cases.

Endlose Kälte Menschliche Gesellschaften sind in hohem Mass dem Klima und dem Wit­ terungsverlauf ausgesetzt. Dies gilt insbesondere für die vorindustrielle Zeit. Im vorliegenden Band stellt die Autorin eine umfangreiche und detaillierte Klimarekonstruktion für den Raum der Burgundischen Niederlande im 15. Jahr­ hundert vor. Diese umfasst einerseits Beschreibungen aus zeitgenössischen Quellen und andererseits Temperatur­ sowie Niederschlagsindizes in saisonaler Auflösung. Die Klimarekonstruktion dient als Untersuchungsgrundlage für die Frage nach dem Einfluss des Witterungsverlaufes auf die Wirtschaft in den Burgundischen Niederlanden. Getreidepreise stellen im Spätmittelalter den zuverlässigsten Konjunkturbarometer dar. Im Verlauf des 15. Jahrhunderts fallen drei Phasen mit sehr hohen Getreidepreisen auf. Eine statistische Auswertung von Preisreihen verschiedener Getreidearten und den saisonalen Indizes zeigt den teilweise sehr engen Zusammenhang beider Grössen auf. Die Autorin legt zudem dar, welche weiteren relevanten Faktoren neben dem Witterungsverlauf im zeitlichen und geographischen Umfeld dieser Hunger­ krisen eine Rolle für den exzessiven Getreidepreisanstieg spielten. Die Autorin Chantal Camenisch studierte Geschichte des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neu­ zeit sowie Kunstgeschichte an der Universität Freiburg i.Ü. Sie promovierte am

The role that the cartwheel played in the life of the Indo-Europeans has primarily been studied from the perspective of specialists, often without suffi-cient consideration of the other fields involved. Therefore, we research an ar-chaeological list of the oldest wheel finds (before ca. 2000 BCE) with regard to the most accurate dating, location, and construction type that now contains 130 representative finds between the North Sea, Central Asia, and India. We then elaborated the five wheel designations in the Indo-European main families, es-pecially in terms of onomasiological aspects. In order to relate both results to the development of the Indo-European languages, chronological scaffolding is needed, for which we bring in a recent glottochronological calculation of the Indo-European subdivisions. This already leads us to conclusions about the age of some designations, as well as clear parallels to certain construction types. In addition, on this updated basis, two often-discussed questions are addressed. With regard to the separation of the (Indo-European) Anatolians and Tocharians, there are many indications that this had taken place around the Caucasus from the eastern primary branch. Finally, the hypotheses for the “invention” of the wheel are replaced by the far more realistic one of a long-lasting development in a wide communicational area.
Correction: I apologize for the typo in footnote 5, please correct the Name to S(usanne) Kuprella.

The studies of the public works in Golden Age Spain were
focused on its technical and artistic aspects, but not on its economic consequences.
But the urban infrastructure maintenance and the building of
bridges, what required frequently the contribution of thousand of places,
were expensive. Its financing, what needed the authorization of Council
of Castile, increased the oppressive taxation of the 17th century, and its
management had its same nature of privatization, lack of control and fraud.

O presente trabalho centra-se na análise do clima e dos estados do tempo no Noroeste de Portugal, entre o início do século XVII e meados do século XIX. O tema escolhido decorre de um problema de fundo: em que medida as variações climáticas e os extremos hidrometeorológicos marcaram as condições ecossistémicas e o quadro de vida das populações? A partir do problema enunciado, formulámos três objetivos centrais, a saber: (i) identificar as principais anomalias térmicas e pluviométricas ocorridas no período e no espaço em questão; (ii) avaliar o impacto das perturbações meteorológicas/climáticas em diferentes processos ambientais, económicos, sociais e culturais da região; (iii) explorar as imagens e as representações sociais construídas em torno deste tipo de fenómenos. Para atingir os objetivos propostos, recorremos a um conjunto diversificado de fontes documentais escritas (particulares e institucionais) e a diferentes tipos de informação (qualitativa e quantitativa). A sua compilação, ordenação e análise proporcionou uma quantidade significativa de dados de grande interesse sobre eventos meteorológicos adversos, que submetemos a diferentes soluções metodológicas e convertemos em indicadores do comportamento climático. As conclusões deste trabalho apontam para o reconhecimento de que as variações climáticas e os extremos hidrometeorológicos tiveram um impacto significativo nos sistemas naturais e humanos, interferindo de forma mais ou menos direta nos recursos ambientais, na produção e no preço dos alimentos, no abastecimento de água, nas infraestruturas, na morbilidade e mortalidade e em muitos outros processos.

The present work focuses on the analysis of climate and weather conditions in the Northwest of Portugal, between the beginning of the seventeenth century and the mid-nineteenth century. The fundamental problem that we discuss is the following: to what extent has climate variations and hydrometeorological extremes influenced the environmental conditions and the living conditions of populations? Three research objectives emerged from our initial question: (i) identify the main temperature and rainfall anomalies occurred in the period and in the study space; (ii) to assess the impact of meteorological/climatic disturbances on different environmental, economic, social and cultural processes in the region; (iii) explore the images and social representations built around this type of phenomena. To achieve the proposed objectives, we use a diverse set of documentary sources (private and institutional) and different types of information (qualitative and quantitative). Their compilation, ordering and analysis provided a significant amount of data of great interest on adverse meteorological phenomena, that we submitted to different methodological solutions and converted them into indicators of the climatic behavior. The conclusions of this work point to the fact that climate variations and hydrometeorological extremes had a significant impact on natural and human systems, interfering in a more or less direct way in environmental resources, production and price food, water supply, infrastructure, morbidity and mortality, and many other processes.

Considerable research has been undertaken into the nature and consequences of contemporary and future global climate change, yet detailed regional studies concerning these dynamics prior to the twentieth century have only recently begun to emerge. This thesis investigates this historical climate-society interface over a c. 400-year period of socio-political change in southeast Africa. This spans the development, expansion and impoverishment of African state structures, and the arrival of the Portuguese and its impacts, between c. 1450-1830 in the Zambezi-Limpopo region, and the origins and events of socio-political transformation between c. 1760-1828 in the KwaZulu-Natal area.

Previous hypotheses have proposed causal relationships between precipitation variability and this societal change, though these are predominantly built upon an apparent coincidence between the inferences of a narrow range of datasets. This cross-disciplinary study therefore reframes this research area by placing the interlinked concepts of vulnerability and resilience at the centre of its approach to tie past climate variability and societal development. First, past climate variability is evaluated using a wide range of proxy-documentary precipitation records over the last millennium, and then reconstructed using wind data from ships’ logbooks in the early-nineteenth century. This analysis reveals good agreement between sources on the evolution of precipitation variability. Similarly, palaeoclimatic, written and oral sources display strong coherence between the increased variability of precipitation and recorded climate impacts, such as in the onset and amelioration of Little Ice Age cool-dry conditions in the 1570s-1590s and 1790s-1820s. While this suggests that direct climatic induced stress increased in times of regional or global climatic change, extensive analysis of food security, livelihoods and socio-political vulnerability from written and oral sources indicates that longer-term, structural vulnerabilities of individuals and communities were crucial in conditioning the plurality of human responses to and the overall significance of past climate variability across southeast Africa.