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Experiencing Climate: Finding Weather in Eighteenth Century Cumbria

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Abstract

This article examines whether Tim Ingold's concept of the ‘weather-world’ can be applied within discussions of climate in archaeology. Using a case study of eighteenth century Cumbria, the article first looks at the issues arising when environmental models are used to investigate landscape change. It then assesses the insights on landscape, weather and farming that can be gained from two historical diaries. It is recognised that advances in complex ecosystem and agent-based modelling have improved ‘climate change archaeology’, but that there are aspects of people's relationships with the weather and climate that are ill-suited to quantification. The article concludes by arguing that people's qualitative engagements with the weather are integral to how past people viewed and used the landscape.

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Acknowledgments

This research was undertaken as part of an AHRC-funded doctoral programme at the Department of Archaeology, University of Sheffield, supervised by Robert Johnston. The paper from which this article derives was originally presented at ‘In Search of the Middle Ground: Quantitative Spatial Techniques and Experiential Theory’, a conference held at the University of Aberdeen in March 2011. Thanks must go to the organisers, D. Graves and K. Millican, for giving me the opportunity to present my research, even in its unfinished form. I thank the staff at the Religious Society of Friends Library and Cumbria Archives Service for their kind help, and I am grateful to all the volunteers who assisted me in the field, particularly R. Eldridge, M. Huggon, N. M. Roth, G. Corbett, A. McCabe and R. Johnston. I also extend my gratitude to the people of Mosser, who could not have been more helpful, to A. Winchester, who directed me to the diary of Elihu Robinson and to two anonymous reviewers for their cogent and constructive critique.

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  1. Department of Archaeology, University of Sheffield, West Court, 2 Mappin Street, Sheffield, S1 4DT, UK

    Toby Pillatt

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  1. Toby Pillatt
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Correspondence to Toby Pillatt.

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Cumbria County Archive and Local Studies Centre, Whitehaven

DFCF/1/116 Pardshaw Monthly Meeting Sufferings Book

The Library of the Religious Society of Friends, London

RSS Box R3 The diary of Elihu Robinson

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Pillatt, T. Experiencing Climate: Finding Weather in Eighteenth Century Cumbria. J Archaeol Method Theory 19, 564–581 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-012-9141-8

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