Anthropogenic historical sources and their use for an interdisciplinary environmental and climate history

Abstract

Since a couple of years, the IPCC acknowledged anthropogenic sources on weather and climate, both documentary and instrumental, among the most valuable for climate reconstruction and climate studies in general. In particular, extreme or at least extraordinary events with an impact on society, such as floods, hail, severe storms, avalanches or droughts were noteworthy to be documented. They allow reconstructing those events and their consequences, including prevention and adaptation strategies for the future, in much detail. This paper will on the one hand give an overview of the most important types of documentary sources from the late Middle Ages up to the early twentieth century pointing out the strengths and limits for the reconstruction of weather, climate and historical hydrology. On the other hand, it will show some potentials for interdisciplinary collaboration between historians and natural scientists, but will also point out the challenges scholars have to face in interdisciplinary research projects and publications. A handful of examples will illustrate how anthropogenic sources and natural archives in some cases support each other symmetrically, how they provide complementary information in other cases, and finally how they sometimes even seem to contradict each other.