History's Changing Climate: Climate Science, Genomics, and the Emerging Consilient Approach to Interdisciplinary History

Few would contest that the natural sciences are transforming the structures of knowledge. What are the implications for history? Abetted by the dizzying increase in computing power, the interpenetration of questions, data, and interpretations from the natural sciences and from historical/archaeological investigations is accelerating. Today’s historians scrutinize the interplay of environment and past societies, and climate scientists seek clues about the present in the effects of climate change on past civilizations. Geneticists detect distant migration events in modern genomes and look to connect them to ancient population movements, and archaeologists rely routinely on high-tech approaches—from groundpenetrating radar to the recovery of ancient dna—to explain the material record of human experience. In 1979, this journal sponsored one of the earliest efforts to bring together scientists and historians to explore “History and Climate” in interdisciplinary fashion. The issues, insights, and questions vented in that jih special issue quickly outstripped the contemporary capacity of both traditional history and science to provide answers. Today, meetings and monographs return to

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