As a palaeo-ecologist, working with historians has made me look critically at the strengths and limitations of my discipline. Resisting the temptation to defer to documents that, however partial or biased, remain far closer to human experience of the land than any pollen sequence, is essential (see Davies and Watson 2007; Hamilton et al. 2009). Richard Tipping (2004) recognized this lure when he distinguished two philosophical approaches to interpreting historic landscape change. These are my starting point for offering an environmental archaeologist's response to the archaeological and interdisciplinary challenges discussed by Toby Pillatt. First, Tipping defined a ‘confirmatory’ approach, in which palaeo-ecologists have sought correlations with written records, but only to confirm documented events, not to challenge them. In this, they have usually relied on selective readings and secondary, often generalized, historical sources. Reading this paper, it is evident that this is not only a one-way process, as those discussing human experience of the environment have been led by models and issues from the environmental sciences, including contemporary concerns. Indeed, a reader of Dawson's (2009) history of Scotland's weather and climate may be forgiven for thinking that all weather was bad weather, with possibly unfavourable expectations for human experience.
Second, Tipping sought to give palaeo-ecological records a stronger voice by using the data to test hypotheses developed from historical sources. In his 2004 paper, this included paying more critical attention to potential causal relations between sociopolitical instability and agrarian practices since assuming causality must, by definition, imply a mechanism of influence. More pertinent to this commentary, Tipping (1998; 2002) has also used pollen records to test Parry's (1978; 1981) model of progressive withdrawal from ‘recurrently marginal’ upland areas during the Little Ice Age, concluding that cultural attachment and socio-economic factors were stronger drivers of cereal production than climate. Clearly, therefore, the problems confronting archaeologists when tackling human–climate/weather relations are by no means unique, since environmental archaeologists and palaeo-ecologists also face challenges in finding a balance when debating coincidence and causality across processes that span a potential multitude of scales in both time and space.
Pillatt deals with several relevant concepts and problems involved in this process that I would like to comment on in order to suggest opportunities for developing joint ways forward: (1) how prevailing ideas and philosophies influence our approach; that is, the interpretative frameworks that inform our thinking; and (2) how we might approach the challenges of informed and critical thinking across disciplines to deal with issues of correlation and causality. In a critique of work correlating volcanic activity with human responses, Buckland, Dugmore and Edwards (1997) stress the need for improved communication across disciplines to ensure that the limitations of differing lines of evidence are recognized and that the most recent advances in methodology and understanding of climate change reconstruction are considered. My suggestions deal with ways in which we might help keep our disciplines in step when moving debates over past human–climate relations forward.
Central to this commentary is how we, as researchers concerned with complex social–ecological systems (Berkes and Folke 1998), expect people to respond to the weather and their consciousness of changing patterns, including ‘normal’ levels of variability, extreme events and longer climate trends. This will determine what response we infer and how this may be recorded through material remains. For instance, Pillatt comments on the complexities of constructing and interpreting weather records. As a result I found myself questioning whether the expectation that local weather records should match a regional amalgam (from another area) was justifiable and, as he discusses later in the paper, how the hopes and outlooks of past individuals or societies coloured their view of the weather. When I first began research in the Scottish Highlands I thought the landscape bleak and oppressive. I was also acutely aware that I was a foreigner in that landscape and careful that my preconceptions did not colour my interpretation – I am reminded of this when reading historical travellers’ colourful or disparaging accounts of their journeys into the Highlands. This increased my desire to understand how inhabitants from various periods felt about where they lived, how they adapted to make the most of its potential whilst buffering themselves against its limits, and what view they had of the wider world with which to compare life in a Highland glen. I have discussed how upland communities may have used their understanding of the land as well as social relations to buffer themselves against the vicissitudes of the upland environment, making climate change alone an insufficient predictor of land-use dynamics in north-west Scotland (Davies 2007). I recognize that this is, no doubt, in many respects a simplistic model, as shown by the discussions of Whyte (1981) and Dodgshon (2004; 2006) on the complex factors and feedback loops that may interpose between the weather and human decisions. Opportunities for palaeo-ecology to engage more with human experience of landscapes and environments are discussed further below.
While I recognize the potential for interpretative frameworks to become limiting, and prevailing paradigms are, as Pillatt discusses, often historically contingent, current theories on social–ecological system complexity can be used to bring together archaeological and palaeo-environmental interests in human–weather relations. The concept of resilience (the adaptive capacity of an ecosystem), for example, incorporates both ‘slow’ and ‘fast’ processes/responses and has been applied to environmental (e.g. Dearing 2008) and human systems (e.g. Fraser 2003; 2007). Evan Fraser used historical case studies to examine the vulnerability of food systems to climate change, including the Irish potato famine. While his interest was primarily in the value of hindsight to characterize vulnerability (Fraser 2007), similar institutional factors and ways of thinking have been proposed in archaeological studies of system collapse, also applying a resilience framework and using the notion of social memory (e.g. Redman and Kinzig 2003). These are potentially useful starting points for exploring common interests.
As well as concepts and theories that provide a common interpretative framework, we also need tools that facilitate the exchange, exploration, development and discussion of new ideas. Fyfe, Caseldine and Gillings (2010) present examples of how palaeo-ecologists have used modelling to develop visualizations of past landscapes, while also recognizing that these are interpretations, not reality. Rather than definitive reconstructions, these are heuristic devices and ‘formal methods of speculation’ (ibid., 156) which can be used as part of a discourse with archaeologists on the implications for past human perceptions and experience of a landscape. The examples published to date deal with vegetation mosaics (e.g. Caseldine and Fyfe 2006) and archaeological monuments (e.g. Winterbottom and Long 2006; Tipping et al. 2009), not climate, but they may provide interactive space for dealing with processes and perceptions that span differing scales and sensitivities. In particular, they may offer a way of transposing the ideas developed by Pillatt to material culture and remains, as the translation of human–weather relations from archaeological dialogue to on-site context are not considered in the paper.
As Pillatt concludes, weather is an inconstant, but inseparable, strand in complex human behaviour. His paper opens opportunities for further dialogue to explore our understanding and interpretative frameworks. I suggest that we also need to observe and learn from our own experience when thinking about past perceptions of weather and how this may affect behaviour and land use. Public support for many environmental issues is declining and there is a growth in climate-change denial (Dyson 2005; Gleick et al. 2010), despite our ever-improving understanding of climate-change mechanisms, many past examples of adaptation and failure, and an overwhelming catalogue of evidence for global environmental change, including predictions that we face a non-analogue future (Williams and Jackson 2007). What does this suggest about our individual and collective social memory? It reminds us as researchers to constantly challenge our own interpretative assumptions to maintain dynamic interdisciplinary dialogue and communicate its relevance (e.g. Bailey and Lindenmayer 2011). Perhaps it is fortunate that part of any palaeo-environmental–archaeological dialogue involves physical environmental processes which may be justifiably interpreted using principles of uniformitarianism.
