Reconstructing Climate from the Archives of Society: Methodological Transformation and New Horizons in Historical Climatology

Historical climatology, which characterizes every kind of document and material remnant produced by humans as “archives of society,” is an interdisciplinary field aiming to reconstruct climate conditions of the pre-instrumental period with high resolution. Today, this field is regarded as a fundamental sub-discipline of the broader “climate history,” which interrogates the place of past weather events in human history. Employing literature review and conceptual analysis methods, this study examines the theoretical evolution of the discipline, ranging from Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's “history without people” approach to the modern quantitative methodologies standardized by Christian Pfister. The first part of the study addresses the “scale gap” problem existing between paleoclimatological data and human experience, and discusses the methodological differences between “archives of society”—which serve to bridge this gap—and “archives of nature.” Subsequently, the indexing (specifically the Pfister Index), calibration, and verification processes, which constitute the backbone of historical climatology and enable the transformation of qualitative records (chronicles, diaries) into statistical data, are analyzed in technical detail. One of the significant findings of the research is that, despite the universal applicability of the existing methodology, its applications remain largely limited to Europe. Based on this observation, the final section argues that the discipline must expand into the Middle East and Islamic geography, which currently stands as “terra incognita” (unknown land). In particular, the potential of Arabic chronicles, nawazil literature, and rain prayers to provide continuous data series has been evaluated not only to fill regional gaps, but also to understand climatic teleconnections in the Mediterranean basin and to gain a global perspective for the discipline.