Adapting to the Little Ice Age in pastoral regions: An interdisciplinary approach to climate history in north-west Europe

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dc.contributor.authorCostello, Eugeneen
dc.contributor.authorKearney, Kevinen
dc.contributor.authorGearey, Benjaminen
dc.contributor.funderHorizon 2020en
dc.contributor.funderUniversity College Corken
dc.date.accessioned2025-06-04T08:31:48Z
dc.date.available2025-06-04T08:31:48Z
dc.date.issued2023-01-31en
dc.description.abstractThis paper uses interdisciplinary methods to investigate responses to the Little Ice Age in regions where livestock farming was dominant, a neglected subject due to the scarcity of detailed written records regarding pastoral land use. It argues that landscape-level histories which include pollen evidence and archaeology can address this challenge and reveal local processes of climate adaptation. Here we focus on Ireland and Scotland and a fascinating rise in small-scale cereal cultivation on upland pastures during the Little Ice Age. Bayesian modeling is used to test the chronological resolution of field evidence and compare it with climate reconstructions. We can see that the cultivation emerged in late medieval times, when cattle were facing climate-related stresses, and increased in early modern times during the Little Ice Age’s main phase. We suggest that it started in an indirect adaptation to climate change, supplementing supplies of food and fodder for pastoralists, but increased as rural populations and external market demands grew. There is a need for finer temporal resolution in pollen records and archaeology, as well as greater integration with socio-economic history, if we are to be more certain about changes in the relative significance of climate in pastoral land use.en
dc.description.sponsorshipUniversity College Cork (Postdoctoral Fellowship)en
dc.description.statusPeer revieweden
dc.description.versionPublished Versionen
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdfen
dc.identifier.citationCostello, E., Kearney, K. and Gearey, B. (2023) 'Adapting to the Little Ice Age in pastoral regions: An interdisciplinary approach to climate history in north-west Europe', Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History, 56(2), pp. 77–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/01615440.2022.2156958en
dc.identifier.doi10.1080/01615440.2022.2156958en
dc.identifier.eissn1940-1906en
dc.identifier.endpage96en
dc.identifier.issn0161-5440en
dc.identifier.issued2en
dc.identifier.journaltitleHistorical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary Historyen
dc.identifier.startpage77en
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10468/17600
dc.identifier.volume56en
dc.language.isoenen
dc.publisherTaylor & Francisen
dc.relation.ispartofHistorical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary Historyen
dc.relation.projectinfo:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/H2020::MSCA-IF-EF-ST/896809/EU/New Frontiers in an Old World? Revealing the Role of North-West Europe's ‘Peripheral’ Outlands in the Growth of Capitalism, c.1400-1900/OutNorthen
dc.rights© 2023, The Authors. Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed,or built upon in any way.en
dc.rights.urihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/en
dc.subjectEnvironmental historyen
dc.subjectPollen recordsen
dc.subjectLittle Ice Ageen
dc.subjectBayesian modelingen
dc.subjectClimate adaptationen
dc.titleAdapting to the Little Ice Age in pastoral regions: An interdisciplinary approach to climate history in north-west Europeen
dc.typeArticle (peer-reviewed)en
dc.typejournal-articleen
oaire.citation.issue2en
oaire.citation.volume56en
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