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A large scholarship currently holds that before the onset of anthropogenic global warming, natural climatic changes long provoked subsistence crises and, occasionally, civilizational collapses among human societies. This scholarship, which we term the ‘history of climate and society’ (HCS), is pursued by researchers from a wide range of disciplines, including archaeologists, economists, geneticists, geographers, historians, linguists and palaeoclimatologists. We argue that, despite the wide interest in HCS, the field suffers from numerous biases, and often does not account for the local effects and spatiotemporal heterogeneity of past climate changes or the challenges of interpreting historical sources. Here we propose an interdisciplinary framework for uncovering climate–society interactions that emphasizes the mechanics by which climate change has influenced human history, and the uncertainties inherent in discerning that influence across different spatiotemporal scales. Although we acknowledge that climate change has sometimes had destructive effects on past societies, the application of our framework to numerous case studies uncovers five pathways by which populations survived—and often thrived—in the face of climatic pressures.

Updating archaeological tree-ring collections for calibrations and verifications with instrumental data is an essential step in ‘updating’ also our understanding of the climate signals in archaeological tree-ring data. Here we delve into the Novgorod tree-ring archives by supplementing the classical medieval chronology with tree-ring data from recently harvested timber. A large, random set of saw logs from the region of archaeological site, hypothetically mimicking the sampling of archaeological timber by medieval people, was used instead of conventional sampling by dendrochronologists on carefully selected sites, to enhance the reciprocal comparability of the datasets. Our tree-ring chronologies provide calibration data explaining 32% of variance in observed February–May temperature and, along with archaeological tree-ring data, a new temperature reconstruction over the medieval period 1160–1416 CE. In the context of the agricultural subsistence economy, we found indications of altering resilience to argue that changes from generally shorter to longer recurrence interval of frost and crop failure events from early (pre-1300) to late (post-1300) period, evident in historical-documentary sources, corresponds with tree-ring evidence. Decreasing amplitude of cool events and growth curtailments and increasing growth rates from early to late period demonstrate long-term change in climate conditions becoming more favorable to agricultural subsistence economy, with implication that the pan-European Great Famine (1315–1322 CE) did not probably extent into NW Russia. Tree-ring data provide means beyond the dating of wooden objects, relevant to the ways in which archaeologists, historians and natural scientists may collaborate in the study of past climate-society nexus.

Historical climatology is an interdisciplinary field of research encompassing the reconstruction of past climate and weather from written sources and artifacts, as well the application of climate reconstructions to the study of human history. Historical climatology has grown in recent years, and this growth has brought both insights and challenges. Research has expanded into new regions and periods and diversified into novel sources, methods, and interdisciplinary collaborations. At the same time, the heterogeneity of evidence and approaches has complicated the integration of multiple climate and weather reconstructions. Moreover, the diversity of disciplinary perspectives, terminologies, and perspectives can create miscommunication among scholars in the field, particularly on issues of historical knowledge and causation. Innovative approaches in the field, including Bayesian methods, may help address these challenges. This article is categorized under:Climate, History, Society, Culture > Disciplinary PerspectivesClimate, History, Society, Culture > World Historical PerspectivesAssessing Impacts of Climate Change > Representing UncertaintyThe Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Knowledge and Practice The first display at the Klimahuset of the Oslo Museum of Natural History presents a timeline of historical events within the growth rings of an old tree. It illustrates the overlay of human and natural histories and of written and physical evidence in simple but compelling fashion. Historical climatology draws on both archives of societies and archives of nature to reconstruct past climates and analyze their historical influence. This integration of diverse evidence and perspectives has proven both insightful and challenging (Photo by Sam White 2022).

This article evaluates 165 studies from various disciplines, published between 2000 and 2019, which in different ways link past climate variability and change to human history in medieval and early modern Europe (here, c. 700–1815 CE). Within this review, we focus on the identification and interpretation of causal links between changes in climate and in human societies. A revised climate–society impact order model of historical climate–society interactions is presented and applied to structure the findings of the past 20 years' scholarship. Despite considerable progress in research about past climate–society relations, partly expedited by new palaeoclimate data, we identify limitations to knowledge, including geographical biases, a disproportional attention to extremely cold periods, and a focus on crises. Furthermore, recent scholarship shows that the limitations with particular disciplinary approaches can be successfully overcome through interdisciplinary collaborations. We conclude the article by proposing recommendations for future directions of research in the climatic change–human history nexus. This article is categorized under:Climate, History, Society, Culture > Ideas and Knowledge (A) Temporal coverage of the 165 studies examining associations between climatic variations and human history for different regions between 700 and 1815 CE which were reviewed considering (B) a revised schematic model of historical climate–society interactions.