Contemporary, but also historical climate change is, in itself, beyond the scale of human perception, but scholars can combine instrumental data, proxy information, and written sources to reconstruct these patterns. What humans could in the past and today still can perceive are meteorological extremes: droughts, heat waves, strong precipitation, floods, cold spells, and storms. Such extreme historical events, however, have generally left only indirect evidence in the material heritage of past human societies. The Virtual Exhibition ‘Weathered History’ presents this legacy to a wider public.
The climate historical working group “Climate Reconstruction and Impacts from the Archives of Societies” (CRIAS), as a part of the PAGES network, aims to demonstrate to the public how environmental change and historical interactions of humans with their environment also have a material side. We are therefore planning to exhibit and contextualize a variety of objects related to:
- Disaster memory: Floodmarks, inscriptions related to weather-induced famine; all kind of mementos commemorating extreme events.
- Coping mechanisms: Religious objects used in weather-rituals; technical means of influencing the weather; infrastructures to guard against weather-related damage.
- Side effects of climate change: Inventions and innovations that can be reasonably connected to slow or rapid climate change; possible influence of specific climatic events on the arts and literature.
- Visualizations of the invisible: How was climate visualized since the concept was invented in antiquity? In the case of pre-modern societies (pre 1750 ), depictions of weather are also of interest.
- Objects of scientific research: Early weather instruments and visualizations of objects and activities used as climate proxies
To this end, we welcome object proposals by scholars from a wide variety of disciplines throughout the humanities and sciences and all cultural and chronological contexts.