The aim of my article is to stimulate debate about the roles weather and climate might play in archaeological interpretations. It is, therefore, encouraging that the respondents have sought to develop and build upon the theoretical themes highlighted. Respondents have tended to agree with me that weather is and was an integral part of people's lives, and also that this is a subject worthy of archaeological research. This was by no means a certainty when we are considering something so ephemeral as weather in a discipline often held in thrall by the imprecisions of chronologies, and which has a penchant for the broad scale and the long term. Of course, these concerns do partly remain, yet the importance of weather, both as the lived experience of climate and as a medium through which people live their daily lives, is not questioned. As Wilkinson points out, the record of Michael the Syrian illuminates the many and varied environmental trials faced by past people, but Davies's anecdote concerning her perception of the Highland landscape warns against assuming that all people recognized and responded to similar weather (or climate) events in similar ways. This suggests that there is value in exploring a weather-based perspective. The question is, how do we get at the human experience of climate in the deeper past, when chronological resolution is coarser and where the lack of written records restricts access to people's perceptions?
In one sense, our ability to answer this question is a function of the data available to us as archaeologists, and the methods and techniques used to collect and collate such data. Although Gronenborn is right to be concerned that the archaeological record only provides limited opportunities for examining the weather, and nearly all the authors highlight the problems surrounding chronological imprecision, there are reasons to be positive. Martin Bell's contribution shows the continuing advances in this area, and demonstrates how previous emphases on long-term, gradual processes are being challenged by research that explores the significance of infrequent high-magnitude events. Wilkinson's call for a greater appreciation of soil climate is one way in which information about past environments can be more closely related to human experience, in this case through agriculture. There is a growing appreciation of what high-resolution environmental data can be gleaned from archaeological contexts, as well as an understanding of how this can be mobilized when examining archaeological questions.
Supporting these methods and techniques, there must be a body of theory that enables us to produce interpretations that recognize and characterize the relationships between human and climate history. My article argues against deterministic or simplistic mechanisms, and for more experiential perspectives on social and climatic change. For the most part, archaeologists have ignored the weather of the past, and this is something that the article sets out to change. As a number of the respondents have pointed out, however, there are already concepts in existence that can provide the foundations for weather-conscious archaeological research. First among these is resilience theory.
The concept of resilience is attractive because, as well as dealing with times of instability and change, it also describes stability, particularly in the face of adversity (Van der Leeuw Reference Van der Leeuw, McIntosh, Tainter and McIntosh2000). In doing so, it attempts to identify and explain the dynamic relationships between long- and short-term processes, and to provide a common point of reference between social and natural processes (Redman and Kinzig Reference Redman and Kinzig2003). This, combined with an emphasis on adaptive cycles, means that it is conceivable that resilience theory could help describe how individual interactions with weather are related to whole societies’ experiences of and responses to climate change. There are reasons to be cautious, however. Redman and Kinzig (ibid.) recognize that, applied uncritically, a resilience model is potentially unsettling: ‘it suggests an underlying uniformity to cultural history’. Moreover, existing applications of resilience theory have tended to focus primarily on economy and population dynamics. For example, Nelson et al. (Reference Nelson, Kintigh, Abbott and Anderies2010) use resilience theory to perform a comparative analysis of human–environment relations in the irrigation-dependent societies of the US south-west, yet the result is a predominantly functionalist assessment of the economic processes that result from interplay between society and environment. There is a danger that interpretations employing resilience theory could become exposed to the well-known, convincing critiques of systems theory and processual archaeology (e.g. Hodder Reference Hodder1991; Barrett Reference Barrett and Hodder2001). As Nelson et al. (Reference Nelson, Kintigh, Abbott and Anderies2010) state, it would require a different sort of analysis in order to define the extent to which social changes were enacted in response to self-identified vulnerabilities to the environment.
This brings me on to a second concept identified by the respondents, that of social memory. Social memory is seen as a way of bridging the long-term processes of climate change and the immediate decisions made by past people in response to the weather. As such, it is linked directly to resilience theory as a means of describing the information flows that help determine human responses to change. It is suggested that social memory acts as a conceptual and symbolic reservoir, through which communities’ environmental knowledge can be transmitted across generations (McIntosh, Tainter and McIntosh Reference McIntosh, Tainter, McIntosh, McIntosh, Tainter and McIntosh2000). Actions at a particular point in history are dependent on perceptions of the environment as they are filtered through the collective knowledge of past experiences stored as social memory. Davies points out that, used in conjunction with resilience theory, social memory might provide a conceptual framework through which climate and weather can be examined from both human and environmental perspectives. In this respect, my study and others like it can be used, as Cooper suggests, to explore the variability and diversity of social memory across human societies, and to assess how this is reflected in the development, transmission and application of traditional ecological knowledge. Problems arise, however, when social memory is abstracted to the societal level.
By conceiving human action and understanding to be underlain by ‘a huge database’ that provides ‘all the information necessary to generate appropriate responses under any given environmental circumstances’ (Ingold Reference Ingold2000, 164), the proponents of social memory reference the field of cognitive anthropology. They present a conception of knowledgeability grounded in Cartesian ontology: the natural body is the input device, conceived separate from the cultural mind, which operates on a societal level. In drawing upon the ecological psychology of James Gibson, as well as elements of phenomenological philosophy, Ingold's (Reference Ingold, Croll and Parking1992; Reference Ingold2000; Reference Ingold2007; Reference Ingold2011) appeals for understanding people within the weather-world rest on a different conception of knowledgeability. Ingold argues that because knowledge ‘merges into life in an active process of remembering rather than being set aside as a passive object of memory, it is not transmitted’ (Ingold Reference Ingold2011, 161, original emphasis). This is a subtle difference, but it is an important one: it foregrounds the importance of lived experience. The aim is not to portray a transcendent individual, completely free from the influence of others, but to recognize that individuals are ‘agent[s]-in-the-environment’ (Ingold Reference Ingold2000, 171; see also Barrett Reference Barrett and Hodder2001; Thomas Reference Thomas2004, 148). Information can be passed from person to person, and certain groups of people may reference certain forms of information in similar ways, but transmitted information is only made meaningful when people put it into the context of their own lived experiences. The abstracted level of societal understanding is replaced with the engaged level of the individual and their journey through life: ‘It is through wayfaring, not transmission, that knowledge is carried on’ (Ingold Reference Ingold2011, 162). Knowledge about how to act in certain situations is, therefore, made through active engagement in the present, not transmitted wholesale from the past through the medium of culturally encoded messages.
Wilkinson is concerned that this focus on experience could result in a jettisoning of climate as an object of study and climate proxies as a data source. It is a worry that perhaps stems from my title, ‘From climate and society to weather and landscape’, but it is not my intention to abandon the concept of climate. Instead, I wish to reaffirm the principle that the people of the past interacted with climate through the day-to-day experience of weather. My study shows that experience to be heavily dependent not only on the physical characteristics of the weather, but also on individual perceptions and world views. And though not discussed in the article, it is clear that amongst different members of one community that experience could vary considerably. The danger is that, if approaches abstract as they apply social memory and resilience theory, this human perspective is lost, and emergent in its place is an anthropomorphic caricature of society, replete with its own memory, sense of self and capacity to act knowledgeably.
As archaeologists, it is important that we never lose perspective on the constitution of societies (cf. Barrett Reference Barrett and Hodder2001). They are not organisms, but the material and metaphysical manifestations of the combined experiences of myriad individuals. This is where identifying diversity, variability and historical particularity become so important, because it is through these experiences that widespread, long-term social and environmental change is both constituted and contextualized. My particular outlook sees these relationships studied through the landscape archaeology of weather-worlds. To be clear, through the emphasis on experience, I do not advocate the essentialism of some phenomenological approaches to archaeological interpretation (Tilley Reference Tilley1994; Reference Tilley2004). Experience here is about shifting focus away from conglomerated societies and towards the lives of people as lived. The archaeological programme is thus devoted to identifying the material conditions that past people were subject to, and then exploring how different actions were thus made possible in different circumstances (Barrett and Ko Reference Barrett and Ko2009). Through this approach, when there is no direct access to past people's perceptions of the weather-world, the phenomenological and ethnographic analogy that is mobilized in its place can be more closely attuned to particular historical realities. As we begin to think about weather more, the more likely we are to discover ways in which engagement with the weather-world is referenced in material remains – for example, through house technologies and settlement patterns (Cooper and Peros Reference Cooper and Peros2010), or even art (Thornes and Metherell Reference Thornes, Metherell, Strauss and Orlove2003). From there, resilience theory, social memory and complex modelling can play a role in moving the analysis across scales, but only if the initial people-centred perspective is maintained.
To conclude, I think the respondents are right to highlight debates concerning contemporary global environmental change as areas where archaeological research can have a direct impact on policy making. As archaeologists, our contribution is expected to cover the deep time of human existence and provide insights on long-term change. Conceptions of social memory and resilience theory have been devoted to these scalar issues as part of attempts to reconcile social and natural processes within comprehensive historical narratives. When dealing with climate and low chronological resolution, however, there is a tendency to abstract these concepts to the societal level. The diversity and variability of social memory is obscured, and resilience theory is expressed in terms of functionalist economics. My article outlines the importance of examining change (and stability) from inhabited, experiential perspectives, centred on people's senses and uses of landscape. In terms of practical archaeological investigation, this means identifying the material conditions of past action, exploring how different actions were made possible by those conditions, and using ethnographic and phenomenological analogy to develop interpretations that centre on interactions with the weather-world. It is an approach that integrates weather and climate within the study of landscape archaeology. The challenge is to then use concepts like social memory and resilience theory to place the resulting weather-centred narratives within the context of long-term interactions with climate – thereby making an invaluable archaeological contribution to those studying contemporary environmental change. After all, in the words of Elihu Robinson, ‘to murmer against ye weather can avail nothing & cannot be right’.
