The foundational work of CLIMCONFLICT has been a multi-centennial reconstruction of violence and conflict for medieval Ireland, synthesising evidence from the island’s many annalistic sources to reconstruct event frequencies ranging from individual murders to mass killings, battles and cattle raids. The project also drew upon natural archives, including precipitation-sensitive Irish oaks and temperature-sensitive European pine and larch, to identify associations between violence, conflict and extreme weather. The combined evidence of these sources suggests an increase in violence following extremes of cold, wet and drought. The project also examined the pathways linking climatic pressures to violence and conflict, including material pathways such as scarcity induced resource competition, in which weather-related harvest failure or livestock mortality promoted contestation over remaining resources.
In its final phase, the project examined how the efficacy of these pathways depended upon the prevailing socioeconomic and cultural context. In particular, the project charted a range of societal coping mechanisms used to restore order following extreme weather and subsistence crises. Such mechanisms included the enforcement of laws by ecclesiastical and secular elites as illustrated by a report for 1050 CE from the Annals of the Four Masters, a year when reduced Irish oak growth reveals conditions of drought. The report describes how “much inclement weather happened in the land of Ireland, which carried away corn, milk, fruit, and fish, from the people, so that there grew up dishonesty among all, [so] that no protection was extended to church or fortress… until the clergy and laity of Munster assembled, with their chieftains… where they enacted a law and a restraint upon every injustice…”.
CLIMCONFLICT results and methodology have been widely disseminated in workshops and conferences. These include the International Medieval Congress (Leeds, UK, 2017), the Scientific Approaches to the Study of the Past summer school (University of Kent, UK, 2017), the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting (Washington D.C. USA, 2017), the European Geophysical Union Annual Meeting (Vienna, Austria, 2016), The Archaeology of Risk and its Perception in the Middle Ages training conference (University of Oxford, UK, 2016), and the inaugural workshop of the PAGES Volcanic Impacts on Climate and Society working group (Columbia University, USA, 2016). Project research has also been published in edited volumes and journals, including contributions to Transdisciplinary Approaches to Science, Arts, Humanities and Technology Studies (2018), Making the Medieval Relevant (2018), the Cambridge History of Ireland (2018) and Indigenous Knowledge: Enhancing its Contribution to Natural Resources Management (2017). The project’s methodology has also been exploited in studying the role of climate in Ancient Egyptian conflict (Nature Communications, 2017).
