Hungarian Historical Review (2018, 3) (Web)

Abstract submission: 30 September 2017

The environmental changes of the last millennium in East Central Europe have been studied for decades, and historians, archaeologists, and natural scientists have made substantial contributions to a more nuanced understanding of the relationships between the environment on the one hand and cultural and political history on the other. Historical processes can hardly be grasped in their complexity without some understanding of the changes that have taken place in the natural environment, and yet for the most part environmental history has remained a marginal topic or perspective in the study of the history of East Central Europe. Indeed, in many countries of the region it is still regarded as an auxiliary discipline of importance primarily simply because it adds an interdisciplinary angle to more traditional historical inquiries.

Environmental history does not have a single agenda. It is neither a turn nor a paradigm in historiography. There are many ways to write environmental history. For their part, archaeologists, geologists, geographers, biologists, palynologists, climatologists etc. have made important contributions, but their work and methodologies have not yet been organized systematically to produce a holistic picture precisely because of the absence of a synthetic historical approach. Furthermore, sometimes these scientists have neglected one another’s work, and some of the different disciplines continue to arrive at contradictory findings. Read more and source … (Web)