Weather and people

Pillatt's research provides exactly the type of critique needed to stimulate debate surrounding the role of archaeology and history in climate studies. The perceptive micro-scale deconstruction of weather, landscape and people in early modern Mosser highlights the precarious disjuncture between the human experience of weather and the processes of climate variability. However, I am certainly a lot more optimistic and positive about the role that archaeology and history have to play in this debate and will perhaps provide a more macro-scale contribution to this particular archaeological dialogue. I would argue that the time-depth of human experience will always be essential in offering context and understanding to individual weather events and longer-term climate variability.

The correlation of documented historical descriptions of weather in 18th-century Cumbria with instrumental records, such as the Central England Temperatures (CET) series and England and Wales Precipitation (EWP) series, provides a tantalizing glimpse of the temporally fluid interface between experience of weather and the impacts of climatic variability. This case study reflects a methodology practised by colleagues working around the world and I believe that such studies show the inherent value in long-term descriptions of weather events and comparisons with the records of meteorological conditions (Demarée and Ogilvie 2008; Lamb 1982; Russell 1998). Such work is an essential component if we, the archaeological and historical community, are to provide the illustrative examples of micro-scale perceptions of weather that are the fundamental building blocks for producing macro-scale societal understandings of the impacts of global climatic change.

Pillatt's paper challenges us to reconsider the role of archaeology and environmental history in understanding the human experience of weather and, perhaps more importantly, forces us to question the fundamentally differing timescales at which both weather and people, and climate and society, operate. I find that the highly personalized accounts from Robinson's papers and Fletcher's diary inspire consideration of the wider relationships between social memory and the resilience of different communities to climatic variability. Such a discussion inevitably leads us to the wider questions of exactly what the time-depth of human experience can offer and of how long-term perspectives can inform modern-day mitigation strategies for global climatic change. This journey, from understanding the human experience of weather variability, through the importance of social memory, and all the way up to the mitigation of modern climate change, involves a winding and precarious path but it is a journey that this paper encourages us to take.

Climate and society

As Pillatt rightly suggests, climate has become a more hotly discussed topic in archaeology in recent years (Mitchell 2008; Van de Noort 2011), but personally I think this is being done very conscientiously by many scholars and is not being directly linked to explanations for social change. There are currently numerous large-scale interdisciplinary projects being led by archaeologists and historians who are attempting to produce multispatial and multitemporal studies of human–weather–landscape and human–climate–environment relationships, such as McGovern et al.'s North Atlantic Biocultural Organization (McGovern et al. 2007), Hegmon et al.'s Long Term Vulnerability and Threat Project (Hegmon et al. 2008) and Kirch's Hawaiian Biocomplexity Project (Kirch 2007). This work has moved well beyond the ‘form of simple causal mechanisms’ (p. 30) that Pillatt is right to have reservations about. These studies, in collaboration with environmental scientists, often use weather event records that include the resolution of seasonally variable rainfall (Nelson et al. 2010) and early or late winters (Adderley, Simpson and Vésteinsson 2008) to show how human communities lived through periods of weather variability in the past. Indeed, the results of this work are beginning to impact world discussions, that, I think, they rightfully deserve, and this highlights the importance of these long-term perspectives to this global debate (see the Global Human Ecodynamics Alliance at www.gheahome.org, and the Integrated History and Future of Peoples on Earth at www.stockholmresilience.org/ihope). I consider these to be exciting projects that highlight the role of time-depth in providing the necessary context to demonstrate the realities of human ecodynamics and, more specifically, to

1. 1 understand the vulnerabilities of human communities to extreme weather events,

2. 2 demonstrate the success and failure of differing mitigation strategies over the long term and

3. 3 reveal the relative resilience of different human lifeways to the impacts of climate variability.

It is true that the topic of causality between climatic variability and societal change, so heavily critiqued in the 1980s and discussed by Pillatt, is still an easy scapegoat for many scholars. However, there are now some good studies of the nuanced ways in which climate variability and environment change interact with social development. Certainly, the idea that the human experience of weather events collapsed societies, as in the Maya region (Hodell et al. 2001) and Rapa Nui (Easter Island) (Diamond 2005), is often promoted by those outside our social-science disciplines, but this conception is being carefully countered based on more informed perspectives of the human experience of weather variability and landscape change (Aimers 2007; Hunt and Lipo 2009). Therefore the question is how studies such as this, that highlight the role of individuals inhabiting a living landscape and their experience of weather, fit within these wider debates.

Pillatt's discussion of 18th-century rainfall and winters in Mosser and their lack of correspondence with the recorded meteorological data from the CET/EWP series clearly shows the fundamentally different timescales at which the human experience of weather events differs from wider meteorological conditions. Whilst this micro-scale is important, I would perhaps also look at this topic from the macro-scale and ask how we should understand the impacts of climate variability in North Atlantic climate systems if not by reconstructing the long-term human experience of weather in places such as Mosser. Since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was set up by the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization in 1988, substantial resources have gone into research on global climate systems and the manifestation of climate change in recorded weather data. Given its crucial role in thermohaline systems, the North Atlantic has been a focus for this research (Marshall et al. 2001) (see CLIVAR at www.clivar.org/index.php) and a review of this research shows the multiple cycles of complexity within which weather events and climate variability are tiered at millennial (solar radiation), centennial (Dansgaard–Oeschger/Heinrich events), decadal (North Atlantic oscillation), annual (El Niño/La Niña) and daily (pressure systems) timescales. So while the daily human experience of North Atlantic climate systems in Mosser in 18th-century Cumbria represents the human face of these events, it is only through the cumulative gathering of data like these on a much greater scale that event-led understandings of weather experiences, such as the cold winter anomaly in the winter of 2009–10 (Seager et al. 2010), can be given context.

The importance of social memory

This example of the disjuncture between both weather and climate, and people and society, shows the importance of understanding the scaled temporalities within which people experience weather events and the masked visibility of the tipping points at which weather variability changes into climatic change. The salient observation by Pillatt of the paradoxical number of earliest, latest, best and worst weather events that litter the descriptions in the historical sources highlights just how immediate yet ephemeral these sorts of reaction to weather can be. Perhaps these observations reflect the nature of the historical sources that record the daily and immediate reaction to events. Such immediate perspectives do not take into account the filtering process of social memory. The passage of time provides a more reflective perspective on the worst events in living memory that include the context of ecological knowledge often maintained over the longer term.

Therefore, whilst non-linear and highly variable in nature, there is certainly a relationship between the scale of impacts of particular weather events and the longevity with which they are remembered within any human community (Crate 2008). This temporally layered relationship between impact and memory is also spatially scaled and dependent on the locality of impact and the communication between communities. In the southern United States it is likely that Hurricane Katrina in 2005 will be remembered for a lot longer than Hurricane Rita of the same year due to the scale of impact on New Orleans, but perhaps this will not be the case for the parish of Cameron in Louisiana, which was largely destroyed by Hurricane Rita. However, it is not social memory alone but, more importantly, the associated ecological knowledge of threat, vulnerability, risk and best course of action should such an event happen again which is most pertinent to a human society. For example, I would be intrigued to know more about the reactions to the weather events within the Fletcher diaries and to understand if knowledge accumulated over time still persists among the farmers of Cumbria. It would lead us to question how far the insidious introduction of technology as a means of understanding weather has gone in replacing local ecological knowledge in Mosser. I would wager the BBC weather forecast is just as chastised today as was the barometer that cost the farmer his crop in this 18th-century source. Tied closely to this discussion is the accumulation of traditional ecological knowledge, which is centrally important for societal resilience, as demonstrated by its crucial role within indigenous societies living in marginal environments, and is tied up closely with this discussion (Watson, Alessa and Glaspell 2003).

Applying traditional ecological knowledge

By definition, traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) takes time to accumulate, with knowledge of extreme weather events often passed through generations for hundreds of years. Current research involving traditional ecological knowledge shows how an important interface between TEK and global climate change monitoring is developing that recognizes the importance of social memory in understanding the impacts of global climatic change. The work of Gearheard et al. highlights this. They have equipped indigenous community members in the Arctic with the means to observe, track and record the active changes in weather conditions, snow characteristics and animal behaviour. The human experiences of weather shine through in these examples, as does the time-depth of knowledge necessary to contextualize them:

By using specially designed Garmin GPS interfaces to document the observational data, the relationship between human experience, ecological knowledge and global environmental change plays out in real time and, through Gearheard's work, links directly back to policy. I see some real parallels with this work and Pillatt's research, as both actively record the human experience of weather events and landscape change. Just as Gearheard et al. have applied the recorded evidence for the human experience of weather to contextualize and understand climate variability, so too can a project be delivered expanding on Pillatt's data and methodologies to inform our understanding of climate variability in northern England.

An archaeological perspective on the importance of social memory and traditional ecological knowledge has been highlighted by my own Leverhulme-funded research into the Archaeology of Climate Change in the Caribbean (Cooper and Peros 2010). The islands of the Caribbean are extremely vulnerable to the cycles and fluctuations in the North Atlantic climate systems (Cooper and Boothroyd 2011). Therefore human communities have been living with the impacts of this weather variability for over 6,000 years. Comparative research focused on the relative resilience of pre-Columbian (4000 B.C.–A.D. 1600) and early modern/modern (A.D. 1600–2011) lifeways to specific weather events has revealed some interesting contrasts in vulnerabilities. In particular, the time-depth of human experience provides an increased understanding of the temporal cycles within which precipitation variation and hurricane landfalls occur in this region. The settlement locations, household architecture and food procurement strategies developed by pre-Columbian communities through time reflect an improved resilience to these extreme weather events (Cooper 2012). At a time when extreme weather events are the greatest fear for many communities currently living in the Caribbean (Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre 2009), such long-term perspectives can provide a context within which to understand the weather event manifestation of climate variability in the region.

Projects such as these, which detail the human experience of weather events as it relates to longer-term climatic variability, show not only the scale of impact that occurs but also, rather, the timing of event and speed of impact that is just as important. Such projects can then reveal the threshold at which weather events and their impacts of climate variability exceed social memory and societal ecological knowledge and thus transcend the boundaries of inherent mitigation in the lifeways of past peoples. These studies highlight the inherent resilience of communities whose cumulative experience of weather events over the long term provides knowledge and understanding of, and by extension preparedness against threshold events in climate manifested through extreme weather. Certainly the global change research community are well aware of this and such ideas of thresholds in the societal capabilities for specific weather events are very pertinent to current discussions (Alley et al. 2003; Lenton et al. 2008).

Communicating beyond archaeology

Therefore I believe that the experience of the rather wet and windy weather of Mosser in Cumbria offers a small part of a wider sum that does have direct relevance to the broader issues of understanding the human experience of global climate change. Such micro-scale case studies are important, highlighting the necessary critiques of time, agency and landscape, but a wider picture has to be appreciated in which we, as a community working with time-depth, have an important contribution to make. Such work, being done by scholars around the world, is now being delivered to the wider academic and policy-making community currently involved in planning mitigation for global climate change (Redman 2012). Archaeologists talking in sessions such as ‘Informing the Future by Understanding the Past’ at the Copenhagen Climate Change Congress in 2009, ‘Climate Change and the Long-Term Sustainability of Human Societies’ at the American Association for the Advancement of Science Meeting in Vancouver in 2012 and ‘Searching the Past for Clues to the Future’ Planet under Pressure in London in 2012 show how archaeologists are delivering this important message beyond our own discipline. Taking this to the next stage is clearly possible as one of the first rounds of the National Science Foundation for Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability grants was awarded to archaeologists, from within the Global Human Ecodynamics Alliance (see www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=122028). This shows how other disciplines and peer-review panels already recognize the importance of archaeology in these discussions. Such interdisciplinary peer recognition is based on their appreciation of the informed and critical perspectives of human experience that are exemplified by Pillatt's research. Therefore I would argue that it is vital for the archaeological community to further develop these initiatives and communicate the importance of social memory and ecological knowledge to those hoping to weather the impacts of climate change.