A new piece by Martin Bauch reviews the types of sources available to climate researchers interested in the medieval world. Bauch weighs the usefulness of documentary and natural archives and how they can be used complementarily, ending with an analysis of how they might be used to study “compound events” in the past. In doing so, Bauch also challenges the recent assertion that past compound climate events cannot be used as case studies for future ones. Find out more about the piece here.
Susi K Frank’s new essay “Natural Archives as Counter Archives: Gulag Literature from Witness to Postmemory” brings a view to how natural archives fit into existing archival theory, encouraging readers to see them as subversive inversions of the powers that shape the archives historians are accustomed to using. The author also analyzes how permafrost is represented in two works of fiction by Varlam Šalamov and Sergei Lebedev, showing how it preserves information about the experience of the gulag that the state wished to be forgotten. In this way, natural archives not only preserve information that traditional archives eschew, but also information that undermines dominant power structures.
Nicholas Cunigan, our newsletter editor, has published the latest issue of our Climate History Newsletter. Inside, you’ll learn about our new team at HistoricalClimatology.com, read up on our latest efforts to standardize document-based climate reconstructions, catch up on our revitalized podcast, and explore the latest scholarship and popular articles in climate history.
Download the issue by clicking here.
Early 20th Century Map of Lake Ventina
A new dissertation looks at environmental change in the Lake Ventina area. Sediment cores provide pollen and isotopic evidence, which combined with historical and archaeological records show heavy anthropogenic impact from the beginning of the study onward. Comparing modern pollen samples with those found in sediment cores, the author also argues that these pollen samples underrepresent the human impact on the landscape throughout the period under consideration. Sediment core pollen also suggests a very different landscape than the present one. Read more about it here.
The Illinois River Valley
A new article by Robert Morrissey in Past and Present examines how climate change affected the ecology of what is today southern Illinois and its indigenous inhabitants during the seventeen and eighteenth century. The author deftly navigates perspectives of indigenous people, Jesuit observers, and data in climate proxy records to show how drought during the Maunder Minimum affected the regeneration of forests on their western borders with the prairie. Indigenous Illinois practices held the mosaic of environments in their territory relatively stable until drought diminished the forest’s ability to regenerate, possibly driving them to relocate their settlements further north. Read the full article here.
Timing of peak temperatures in recent climate shifts
A recent paper in the journal Nature highlights the disparity in how different regions of the world experienced climate change before the industrial revolution. Researchers created a model based on climate proxy data and found that major warm and cool periods were asynchronous across space. The Little Ice Age, for example, was at its coldest during the fifteenth century in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean, the seventeenth century in Europe and southeastern North America, and during the mid-19thcentury for much of the rest of the world. Read more about it here.
A new climate history of the Pantepui region of southeastern Venezuela and southwestern Guyana demonstrates methods for tracking past climate change in tropical regions. The authors also use their reconstruction to track changes in the biosphere, hypothesizing that the region’s unique biota was preserved through these changes by migrating into lowland areas that today would not support them. The authors also address the difficulties of working in tropical areas where climate proxies usually lack sufficient resolution to create detailed records. Find more about the piece here.
