Toby Pillatt is right. Weather is important. Weather is important every day, as is evident from almost every news broadcast we watch or hear. This is not only true for extreme weather situations – which currently abound in the news – but for ordinary weather conditions at any time. The importance is quite clearly reflected in the numerous weather channels and weather websites and the weather forecast at the end of every news programme. Despite the ‘benefits of civilization’ which today make us often independent of outside influences, many simple daily decisions are still based on the current weather situation. Weather is our first and most immediate environmental experience. It was no different in the past. On the contrary, weather-based decisions were much more important historically than at present, both for individuals and for entire societies. No doubt, then, weather should be of concern also for historical studies. Hence Toby Pillat is right. He is also correct in stating that by involving a palaeo-weather perspective we can add much to our understanding about how past societies operated.

But how applicable is a focus on weather in archaeology and what kind of information would we gain? Palaeo-weather-related studies, as suggested by Pillatt, would entail a component of sensing. Sensing is certainly an important factor in shaping mentalities, sometimes of large social entities. However, sensing may only be analysed if past peoples leave records of their ways of thinking. In most cases these would be written records, sometimes pieces of art – drawings, paintings, sketches, possibly on cave walls, or figurative art. If no such records exist, then the academic concern with sensing becomes a matter of guessing, of vague interpretation. Often such studies tell you more about the scholar than about the period under investigation (this is certainly also true for any historic text or image analysis, yet presumably to a lesser degree). In any case, thorough and methodologically sound approaches to weather and its effect on humans are largely limited to periods from which textual sources exist, through which we may gain an immediate eyewitness internal perspective.

There are but few exemptions. Extreme weather situations often leave evident records in the environment – flood layers, landslides and so on. Under fortunate circumstances such evidence may be dated quite precisely. It may then be brought in connection to archaeological evidence and the possible effects of such extreme weather events on the societies may be contemplated. For less-pronounced weather effects and for less-well-dated events any robust correlation is hardly possible. This brings me to the next problem: dating.

Any palaeoclimatology, or palaeo-weather-informed archaeology, faces one major and immediate problem: the correlation of archaeological chronologies and palaeoclimatological age models. No robust cause-and-effect hypothesis can be phrased if the chronologies are not well controlled. Often, contemporaneity may only be established on a rather coarse level. This then leaves ample room for speculation but no room for sound detailed theories. The entire discipline is dependent on fine-grained and robust chronological schemes in both the historic and the palaeoclimatological disciplines. Such fine-grained chronologies exist for recent periods which are text-documented but not for the more distant past, nor for any prehistoric period. For these periods we will have to rely on more coarsely grained approaches, based on climate rather than on weather and on quiet sources provided by prehistoric archaeologies rather than on text exegeses. A third problem is rooted in the data sets themselves. Palaeoclimate is mostly documented in proxy records, not actual records of temperature or amount of precipitation, for example. Individual weather situations are extremely difficult to extract from such data sets.

Beyond these questions of scale, data quality and resolution, there is another aspect to why ‘traditional’ palaeoclimate-informed archaeology should not be neglected. The dichotomy of terms suggested by Pillatt's title, ‘From climate and society to weather and landscape’, does not – in reality – exist. These two pairs of terms are not contradictions but rather two coexisting approaches and – as I said above – they are two approaches at different scales of resolution. Studies focusing on climate and society are concerned with questions of economy, possibly politics and perhaps other social matters. They focus on resource utilization, economic and ecological margins, crises, reformations and searches for processes and mechanisms within and between various groups and societies. This approach is – in a way – related to the processual approaches which, at least in geography and other palaeoclimate-focused disciplines, have never vanished.

Weather- and landscape-based studies – in the sense promoted by Pillatt – focus on sensing and experience, search for the individual and the individual's response to outside challenges, and are related to the postprocessual approaches of the 1990s. These are two different research agendas targeted at different results and maybe also at different academic audiences. In any case, they do not contradict each other; in fact, they complement each other. Lastly, any historical process is composed of innumerable individual experiences. If, however – and this Pillatt admits – each and every one of these experiences had survived and needed to be analysed, a thorough understanding of the period in question might not be reached as the data would be overwhelming. Thus a certain amount of abstraction would have to be applied and conclusions would have to be drawn from this level of abstraction, bearing in mind that individual experiences of the phenomenon under investigation might give different impressions. This level of abstraction is applied by the more coarser-grained palaeoclimate-informed studies.

Pillatt's call for weather and landscape is justified. Weather and, where possible, its effect on humans should be incorporated into holistic approaches to the past. Certainly it was weather and not abstract climate that was felt by past peoples and it was to weather that they reacted. But possibilities to focus on weather are extremely limited, largely to periods covered by texts or to single events. The great majority of the human past is not documented by internal texts, and, moreover, archaeological relics have survived only in fragments – the gaps of knowledge are wide and deep. This is also true for most of the palaeoclimatic data sets. This, then, limits the approach suggested by Pillatt to Europe no earlier than about a thousand years ago and to much of the rest of the globe no earlier than about a hundred years ago. For any other period a fine-grained approach at the resolution required for weather (i.e. days, weeks or, depending on definition, months) is not and maybe will never be possible. Pillatt is aware of these problems for the ‘more distant past’; however, I find his suggestions to overcome them rather vague. His last call for a more detailed and thoughtful consideration of the relations between ‘climatic cause and social effect’ (p. 41) is on a much firmer basis. At present, however, the limits to such detailed hypotheses and the theories built from them remain considerable for most periods and regions of archaeological investigation.