Volcanoes, Climate and History
8 - 12 January 2024
Final Workshop
11 January 2024
Exhibition Opening "Curiosity Unbound - Volcanoes, Climate and History"
Volcanoes, Climate and History
Cooperation Group
November 2021 - January 2024
Volcanic eruptions can affect the Earth’s climate system, and climate variability occupies an uncomfortable place in historical enquiry. Even though human demography and history are closely connected with environmental conditions and change, most historians and archaeologists have been reluctant to consider climate for understanding political, economic, social and cultural transformations. Much of the scholarship addressing these complex relationships continues to be constrained by the disciplinary limits of individuals and institutions.
VCH will engage with the interface of climate and history in a new way, beginning with the premise that exchange and dialogue across disciplinary and epistemological divides should be habitual practice. Five one-week meetings of the seven Core Group Fellows, together with an additional six scholars per meeting, will allow us to disentangle the possible climatic and environmental responses and societal consequences of volcanic eruptions. Our hypothesis-driven meetings will prioritise those challenges that constitute present frontiers of knowledge in any given field. Through the generation, interpretation and integration of new environmental and societal evidence in the form of large, high-resolution spatiotemporal primary datasets from different disciplines, time periods and regions, we will interrogate the direct and indirect influences of volcanically-induced climate and environmental variation on historical trajectories. Overcoming reductionistic and deterministic methods we will answer the following questions: How have volcanic eruptions affected the Earth’s climate system, and how have environmental responses impacted agriculture, human health, demographics, settlement, social structure, commerce and conflict? How have societies in different periods of the Holocene and in different parts of the world responded to the direct and indirect influences of volcanism, and why were some eruptions more devastating than others? What role did past volcanic eruptions, together with the associated climatic changes and environmental responses play in the outbreak of major plague pandemics?
VCH will establish novel conceptual and methodological approaches, and intellectual pathways to conduct rigorous comparative research that bridges the knowledge gaps between archaeologists, climatologists, ecologists, historians and volcanologists. Our long-term contributions to understanding historical trajectories will be influential within the academy and ongoing policy debates, and prove inspirational and informative to a wider public fascinated by our past, and increasingly concerned with future wellbeing. Highly relevant to the field of global change research and supplemented by media coverage, the scientific breakthroughs from each meeting will be published in leading disciplinary and interdisciplinary journals.
VCH will produce a high-end documentary film about the conceptual, intellectual and personal aspects of each of the meetings, their participants, and its collective entity. The film will use expert interviews to tell the story of the volcano-climate-human nexus from different epistemological perspectives, and will also show how academic models, scientific paradigms and public perceptions have changed during the past 50 years. The film will critically address the scale of volcanic eruptions, and the climates and environments they impact. Its narrative will weave in the interdisciplinary discourse of world-leading scholars from the humanities and natural and social sciences who are willing and able to overcome disciplinary boundaries through fully cooperative engagement.
Universität Bielefeld/P. Ottendörfer 
Universität Bielefeld/R. Moltmann .jpg)
Universität Bielefeld/P. Ottendörfer
Meetings
- Workshop 1
Archaeological Examinations
15 - 19 November 2021
PARTICIPANTS
Fellows
Ulf Büntgen (Cambridge, GBR), Nicola Di Cosmo (Princeton, USA), Jan Esper (Mainz, GER), Lamya Khalidi (Nice, FRA), Franz Mauelshagen (Bielefeld, GER), Clive Oppenheimer (Cambridge, GBR), Eleonora Rohland (Bielefeld, GER)
Guests
Ursula Brosseder (Bonn, GER), Michael Frachetti (St. Louis, USA), Susanne Hakenbeck (Cambridge, GBR), Olaf Jöris (Neuwied, GER), Stefan Kröpelin (Cologne, GER), Charlotte Pearson (Tucson, USA), Felix Riede (Aarhus, DEN)- Workshop 2
Proxy Reconstructions
9 - 13 May 2022
PARTICIPANTS
Fellows
Ulf Büntgen (Cambridge, GBR), Nicola Di Cosmo (Princeton, USA), Jan Esper (Mainz, GER), Michael Frachetti (St. Louis, USA), Anna Gudjónsdóttir (Hamburg, GER), Lamya Khalidi (Nice, FRA), Franz Mauelshagen (Bielefeld, GER), Clive Oppenheimer (Cambridge, GBR), Eleonora Rohland (Bielefeld, GER)
Guests
Dominik Fleitmann (Basel, CHE), Ronny Friedrich (Mannheim, GER), Fredrik Ljungqvist(Stockholm, SWE), Gill Plunkett (Belfast, GBR), Michael Sigl (Bern, CHE), Philip Slavin (Glasgow, GBR), Moritz Wehrmann (Weimar, GER)- Workshop 3
Model Simulations
21 - 25 November 2022
PARTICIPANTS
Fellows
Ulf Büntgen (Cambridge, GBR), Nicola Di Cosmo (Princeton, USA), Jan Esper (Mainz, GER), Michael Frachetti (St. Louis, USA), Anna Guðjónsdóttir (Hamburg, GER), Lamya Khalidi (Nice, FRA), Franz Mauelshagen (Bielefeld, GER), Clive Oppenheimer (Cambridge, GBR), Eleonora Rohland (Bielefeld, GER)
Guests
Jonathan Donges (Potsdam, GER), Fidel Gonzalez-Rouco (Madrid, ESP), Christoph Raible (Bern, CHE), Anja Schmidt (Munich, GER / Cambridge, GBR), Claudia Timmreck (Hamburg, GER), Sebastian Wagner (Geesthacht, GER)- Workshop 4
Historical Interpretations
24 - 28 April 2023
PARTICIPANTS
Fellows
Ulf Büntgen (Cambridge, GBR), Nicola Di Cosmo (Princeton, USA), Jan Esper (Mainz, GER), Michael Frachetti (St. Louis, USA), Anna Gudjónsdóttir (Hamburg, GER), Lamya Khalidi (Nice, FRA), Franz Mauelshagen (Bielefeld, GER), Clive Oppenheimer (Cambridge, GBR), Eleonora Rohland (Bielefeld, GER)
Guests
Rudolf Brázdil (Brno, CZE), Bruce Campbell (Belfast, GBR), Vinita Damodaran (Sussex, UK), Heli Huhtamaa (Bern, CHE), Sturt Manning (Cornell, USA), Tim Newfield (Washington, USA), Ursula Brosseder (Bonn, GER), Frederick Reinig (Mainz, GER), Raymond Ruhaak (Liverpool, UK), Max Torbenson (Mainz, GER), Moritz Wehrmann (Weimar, GER)- Workshop 5
Knowledge Integrations
27 November - 1 December 2023
PARTICIPANTS
Fellows
Ulf Büntgen (Cambridge, UK), Nicola Di Cosmo (Princeton, USA), Jan Esper (Mainz, GER), Michael Frachetti (St. Louis, USA), Anna Gudjónsdóttir (Hamburg, GER), Lamya Khalidi (Nice, FRA), Franz Mauelshagen (Bielefeld, GER), Clive Oppenheimer (Cambridge, UK), Eleonora Rohland (Bielefeld, GER)
Guests
Tito Arosio (Cambridge, UK), Maddalena Barenghi (Venice, IT), Dario Battistel (Venice, IT), Feng Chen (Kunming, CHN), Minoru Inaba (Kyoto, JPN), Michael Kempf (Kiel, GER), Mark Macklin (Lincoln, USA), Olga Solomina (Moscow, RUS), Sören Stark (New York, USA)- Workshop 6
Volcanoes, Climate and History
8 - 12 January 2024
PARTICIPANTS
Fellows
Ulf Büntgen (Cambridge, UK), Nicola Di Cosmo (Princeton, USA), Jan Esper (Mainz, GER), Michael Frachetti (St. Louis, USA), Anna Gudjónsdóttir (Hamburg, GER), Lamya Khalidi (Nice, FRA), Franz Mauelshagen (Bielefeld, GER), Clive Oppenheimer (Cambridge, UK), Eleonora Rohland (Bielefeld, GER)
Members
- Convenor
Cambridge University, UK
Ulf Büntgen is Professor of Environmental Systems Analysis at the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, UK. His main research interest and expertise are in the reconstruction of climate and environmental change at different spatiotemporal scales, with emphasis on linking natural data with historical evidence.
- Fellows
Princeton, USA
Nicola Di Cosmo is Henry Luce Foundation Professor of East Asian History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, USA. His main research interest and expertise are in the relations between China and inner Eurasia from prehistory to the modern period, with emphasis on using natural proxy data in the study of the Mongol empire and the Qing dynasty.
Mainz, GER
Jan Esper is Professor of Physical Geography and Climatology at the Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. His main research interest and expertise are in dendrochronology and high-resolution paleoclimatology, with emphasis on the development of multimillennial-long ring width and wood density chronologies from the upper and northern treelines.
St. Louis, USA
FMichael Frachetti is Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on the ecology and social strategies of ancient nomadic societies of Central and Eastern Eurasia. He is the author of Pastoralist Landscapes and Social Interaction in Bronze Age Eurasia (UCPress, 2008). He currently conducts fieldwork in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
Hamburg, GER
Anna Guðjónsdóttir is an Icelandic artist based in Hamburg. Her main research interest and area of expertise is in painting and site-specific art, transforming an environment into a certain experience based on human understanding of landscape, nature and cultural history. She uses painting and the exhibition space itself as a medium. Her main fieldwork has been concentrated on accessible areas on the mid-Atlantic ridge in Iceland.
Nice, FRA
Lamya Khalidi is a Researcher at CNRS and the University of Cote d’Azur in Nice, France. Her main research interest and expertise are in environmental archaeology, with emphasis on the dynamical processes of human transformation and adaptation in response to volcanism in East Africa and the Middle East during different periods of the Holocene.
Bielefeld, GER
Franz Mauelshagen is a Senior Lecturer at Bielefeld University, Germany. His main research interest and expertise are in environmental history, with a strong expertise in historical climate research, disaster history and the Anthropocene. His work seeks to place examples of human-climate interactions of the Anthropocene in a longer-term context of modern history in, both, the "Old" and "New Worlds".
Clive Oppenheimer12https://www.geog.cam.ac.uk/people/oppenheimer/
Cambridge, UK
Clive Oppenheimer is Professor of Volcanology at the University of Cambridge, UK. His main research expertise is in volcanic processes and hazards, with emphasis on the long-range climatic and societal impacts of eruptions. He has participated in 14 missions to Antarctica, and made two documentary features with Werner Herzog: Into the Inferno, and Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds.
Bielefeld, GER
Eleonora Rohland is Professor for Entangled History in the Americas and Director of the Center for InterAmerican Studies (CIAS) at Bielefeld University, Germany. Her main research interest and expertise are in the environmental and climate histories of North America and the Caribbean, with emphasis on the history of knowledge and technology, as well as economic, insurance and disaster history.
Publications
- All Publications
- Comment: Büntgen U (2024) The importance of distinguishing climate science from climate activism. npj Climate Action 3: 36.
- Büntgen U, Oppenheimer C, Li P, Frachetti M, Esper J, Torbenson M, Krusic PJ (2023) Drought as a trigger of the rapid rise of professional skateboarding in 1970s southern California. PNAS Nexus 2: 1-4.
- Frachetti M, di Cosmo N, Esper J, Khalidi L, Mauelshagen F, Oppenheimer C, Rohland E, Büntgen U (2023) The Dhaliagram: A new tool for interdisciplinary investigation, visualization, and communication of past human-environmental interaction. Science Advances 9.
- Hakenbeck S, Büntgen U (2022) The role of drought during the Hunnic incursions into central-east Europe in the 4th and 5th centuries CE. Journal of Roman Archaeology.
- Büntgen U, Crivellaro A, Arseneault D, Baillie M, Barclay D, Bernabei M, Bontadi J, Boswijk G, Brown D, Christie DA, Churakova (Sidorova) OV, Cook E, D’Arrigo R, Davi N, Esper J, Fonti P, Greaves C, Hantemirov RM, Hughes MK,Kirdyanov AV, Krusic PJ, Le Quesne C, Ljungqvist FC, Myglan VS, Nicolussi K, Oppenheimer C, Palmer J, Qin C, Reinig F, Salzer M, Stoffel M, Torbenson M, Villalba R, Wiesenberg N, Wiles G, Yang B, Piermattei A (2022) Global wood anatomical perspective on the onset of the Late Antique Little Ice Age (LALIA) in the mid-6th century CE. Science Bulletin 67: 2336-2344.
- Büntgen U, Esper, J, Oppenheimer, C. (2022) In praise of archives (and an open mind), Communications: Earth & Environment, 3: 84.
- Büntgen U, Hodgson Smith, S, Wagner, S, Krusic, P, Esper, J, Piermattei, A, Crivellaro, A, Reinig, F, Tegel, W, Kirdyanov, A, Trnka, M, Oppenheimer, C (2022) Global tree‑ring response and inferred climate variation following the mid‑thirteenth century Samalas eruption. Climate Dynamics 59: 531-546.
- Büntgen U (2021) Warum die Klimatologie Vulkane untersuchen sollte. Naturwissenschaftliche Rundschau 74: 500-503.
- Büntgen U, Allen K, Anchukaitis K, Arseneault D, Boucher É, Bräuning A, Chatterjee S, Cherubini C, Churakova (Sidorova) O, Corona C, Gennaretti F, Grießinger J, Guillet S, Guiot J, Gunnarson B, Helama S, Hochreuther P, Hughes MK, Huybers P, Kirdyanov AV, Krusic PJ, Ludescher J, Meier WJ-H, Myglan VS, Nicolussi K, Oppenheimer C, Reinig F, Salzer MW, Seftigen K, Stine AR, Stoffel M, St. George S, Tejedor E, Trevino A, Trouet V, Wang J, Wilson R, Yang B, Xu G, Esper J (2021) The influence of decision-making in tree ring-based climate reconstructions. Nature Communications 12: 3411.
- Büntgen U, Urban O, Krusic PJ, Rybníček M, Kolář T, Kyncl T, Ač A, Koňasová E, Čáslavsky J, Esper J, Wagner S, Saurer M, Tegel W, Dobrovonly P, Cherubini P, Reinig F, Trnka M (2021) Recent European drought extremes beyond Common Era background variability. Nature Geoscience 14: 190-196.
- Di Cosmo N, Wagner S, Büntgen U (2021) Climate and environmental context of the Mongol invasion of Syria and defeat at ‘Ayn Jālūt (1258–60 CE). Erdkunde 75: 87-104.
- Reinig F, Wacker L, Jöris O, Oppenheimer C, Guidobaldi G, Nievergelt D, Adolph F, Cherubini P, Engels S, Esper J, Land A, Lane C, Pfanz H, Remmele S, Sigl M, Sookdeo A, Büntgen U (2021) Precise date for the Laacher See eruption synchronizes the Younger Dryas. Nature 595: 66-69.