Abstract
The new scientific climate history is about more than just the history of climate. It is developing in a new climate of history; it forms one of several leading edges in archaeoscience, the broader transdisciplinary convergence that brings the power of science to bear on the human past. Along with the emergence of archaeogenetics, biomolecular archaeology, and digital humanities—such as geographical information systems (gis) and computational philology (quantitative 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.
Highlights
In a world of learning increasingly blinded 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—potentially civilization-altering—phenomena in the world in which we and our successors must live
Next-generation technology—in the form of ultra–high-resolution analysis developed by the Climate Change Institute (CCI) of the University of Maine—has opened the way to recovering new historically datable environmental and cultural records from ancient ice in the heart of Europe and elsewhere
Along with the emergence of archaeogenetics, molecular archaeology, and digital humanities—such as geographical information systems (GIS) and computational philology—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
Summary
Next-generation technology—in the form of ultra–high-resolution analysis developed by the Climate Change Institute (CCI) of the University of Maine—has opened the way to recovering new historically datable environmental and cultural records from ancient ice in the heart of Europe and elsewhere. We cannot build a climate history from the written records alone, especially, as Le Roy Ladurie emphasized, before 1000 A.D. To go deeper, we must integrate our historical record with the scientific signals of climate deduced from natural-proxy archives, which expands the detailed climate horizons presently available to us beyond a few centuries to 2,000 years or more.[18]
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