CMATE Special Lecture
Climate variability and change is increasingly recognized now as a likely contributor to past cultural change and collapse in many parts of the world, but its interpreted level of importance is not always clear and can be somewhat controversial. Even in Europe and Western Eurasia, where historical and archeological records of past cultural change are abundant over the past 2,000 years of the Common Era, there is considerable uncertainty about how much climate has played a role in actively contributing to those known changes. Much of this uncertainty is due to our still rudimentary understanding of climate variability and change over the region during the first 1,000-1,500 years of the Common Era. This knowledge gap is closing now through the development of millennia-long tree-ring chronologies over Europe and Western Eurasia, with similar relevant advances occurring in Central and East Asia as well. These exactly dated and annually resolved archives of environmental change can be used to reconstruct past climate and thus provide a paleoclimate context for periods of cultural change and upheaval in Europe and Western Eurasia. Examples of how tree-ring reconstructions of past climate over this region can provide this information will be shown. This includes examples from the ‘Old World Drought Atlas’ (OWDA) centered on Europe, which is now nearing completion. Challenges remain in assembling the necessary tree-ring network of millennia-length chronologies from areas such as Europe where little old-growth forest remains. Archeological tree-ring data are for the most part the current best source for constructing such chronologies, but assembling those records into ones suitable for climate interpretation is fraught with uncertainties. Even so, the future is bright for constructing a climate history of Europe and Western Eurasia from tree-ring networks for cultural interpretation.