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Diseased, Cold, Violent, and Scottish: environmental data and the revision of Scotland’s medieval history.

Thu, March 30, 3:30 to 5:00pm, The Drake Hotel, Astor

Abstract

Historical and archaeological understanding of political, social, economic and cultural change across the North Atlantic and the European Atlantic regions generally is being transformed by the inclusion of environmental data from documentary, archaeological and paleoecological sources. These sources are supplying increasingly high resolution environmental data, in terms of both temporal and geographic precision, and is creating a much more nuanced and multifaceted understanding of the intersection of environments, mentalities, culture, economics and politics in the past. Until recently however, documentary evidence and regional to local resolution environmental proxy data for Scotland has been limited or under-explored. Consequently, engagement by historians of medieval Scotland with analysis of environmental factors as motors for long term and large scale change has been limited. Such limited engagement has hindered the adoption of the interdisciplinary methodologies that often are the instruments of collection of such environmental data from both documentary and archaeological sources. Yet the potential for integrating environmental data from these sources into our understanding of the upheavals of Scotland’s long 14th century is vast. This paper will provide an overview of the value of such data and methodologies in providing context for the well-rehearsed narratives of political reconfiguration and socio-economic realignment that have characterized much past Scottish historical discourse.

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