‘Calibrating’ Palaeoclimatology-informed Research in Old World Archaeology: Data, Methods and Theories

After two decades of increasing and often deterministic palaeoclimatology-informed archaeological research there is a need to scrutinize, calibrate and improve our approaches to climate change in the past and present. Simple cause-and-effect correlations, often on the basis of coarsely resolved time series, are gradually being supplemented by multi-scalar models of non-linear dynamics, including concepts such as adaptive cycles or critical transitions. Furthermore, mathematical modeling of culture-environment/climate interaction is increasingly applied to single out parameters or to search for alternative explanations. Palaeo-climatic time series have become more precise, as have archaeological chronologies, and with the increase in temporal resolution previous interpretations of climate-culture interconnections on a continental or global scale are beginning to be challenged and to be replaced by more fine grained locally and regionally scaled research projects. This session will present case studies of such multi-scalar palaeoclimatology-informed archaeology from the Old World, and will discuss the data, methods and theories as well as outline future directions for palaeo-climatic research in archaeology.