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Towards Better Histories of Climate and Society: Investigating Late Antique and Medieval Climate Change

Thu, April 4, 8:30 to 10:00am, Westin Denver Downtown, Floor: Mezzanine Level, Curtis

Session Submission Type: Complete Panel

Abstract

Today’s human-caused global warming has no precedent, yet natural forces have profoundly changed local, regional, and even global climates over the 300,000-year history of humanity. Prominent scholars, including historians, have long argued that these changes destabilized or destroyed past societies, and thereby caused or worsened widespread human mortality. These climatic explanations for past disasters are more abundant and more influential than ever before, owing both to the increasing quantity of evidence for past climate change, and the growing urgency of the present-day climate crisis. Yet most historians continue either to ignore climatic explanations for past events, or else assign them to decidedly secondary status among the forces that shape human affairs. The reason for this widening dichotomy between climate scholars and the majority of historians lies in the difficulty of linking climatic and human histories, which in turn reflects the difficulty of integrating diverse disciplinary evidence and methods. This panel of scholars from Georgetown University, one of the leading centers for climate history, surveys late antique and medieval history to highlight key challenges in identifying human responses to past climate changes, and to explore how these challenges can be overcome.

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