{"id":632,"date":"2007-06-21T16:08:12","date_gmt":"2007-06-21T20:08:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hub-dev.bates.edu\/magazine\/?page_id=632"},"modified":"2017-09-06T11:38:46","modified_gmt":"2017-09-06T15:38:46","slug":"ask-me-another-cont-2","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/back-issues\/y2007\/summer07\/quad-angles\/ask-me-another-4\/ask-me-another-cont-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Ask Me Another cont."},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a continuation of the<\/em> “Ask Me Another”<\/em><\/a> conversation with Michael Jones, the Christian A. Johnson Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies.<\/em><\/p>\n

You’ve suggested that climate change\u00a0and subsequent famine had much to\u00a0do with the displacement of\u00a0the Britons by\u00a0Anglo-Saxon invaders\u00a0in the fifth century. What prompted your scholarship\u00a0to go in this direction?<\/strong><\/p>\n

In\u00a0Europe, I\u00a0studied historical geography, which focuses on\u00a0many of the\u00a0same questions and interests that environmental studies is developing in the United States.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Michael Jones<\/p><\/div>\n

I was enamored\u00a0with the historiographical tradition that\u00a0came out of the Annales School of France,\u00a0with Marc Bloch and Fernand Braudel. They pioneered the concept of \u201ctotal history,\u201d that history was\u00a0more than politics, war or\u00a0social relations. You also had to understand the natural world to understand human culture in a particular time. So, they contrasted traditional history based\u00a0on events with total history. I thought that sensible.<\/p>\n

Braudel in particular said\u00a0that climate\u00a0and geographical location were important factors. But\u00a0he believed\u00a0that climate changed\u00a0so slowly that effects\u00a0on peoples\u2019 conceptions of themselves or their actions would not be noticed.\u00a0This\u00a0gradualist model of climate change was what I inherited from my interest in historical geography.<\/p>\n

But Braudel and others were\u00a0studying the Mediterranean world.\u00a0And they had not experienced in their lifetimes much in the way of climatic variation. So, it was wrenching for me to say that Braudel and the Annales School were wrong \u2014<\/strong> climate change can occur quickly enough to create measurable and significant historical change, as it did\u00a0at the ending of\u00a0Roman Britain.<\/p>\n

What\u00a0is your scholarship focused on\u00a0now?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m trying to chart the occurrence of famine between A.D. 300 and 700\u00a0in western Europe, north of\u00a0the Alps, to test how important famine\u00a0might be as a historical driver. In isolating\u00a0particular episodes of famine, I’m trying\u00a0to discover which famines were induced by environmental crisis and which famines were caused primarily by\u00a0human agencies. Within the study of famine, there\u2019s a lively theoretical debate as to whether famine is caused\u00a0in a neo-Malthusian way, by overpopulation, lack of resources and environmental factors, or if it is more often the result of power inequities.<\/p>\n

If I can find a corpus of closely dated famine episodes\u00a0that seem to\u00a0be the result of environmental crisis, and if I can match those episodes against ice-core records \u2014 which include proxy information about the atmosphere and climate \u2014\u00a0I might be able to\u00a0correlate\u00a0a particular set of environmental conditions with the\u00a0occurrence of environmentally caused famine.\u00a0Significantly, ice cores provide a continuous record, so historians\u00a0could make inferences about the relative scarcity of food supplies in periods\u00a0even where there are few or no written records at all.\u00a0 Of course, I might be chasing a philosopher\u2019s stone!<\/p>\n

Is there a famine you have in mind?<\/strong><\/p>\n

After the\u00a0initial success of the fifth-century\u00a0Anglo-Saxon invasions,\u00a0there\u2019s a political and military\u00a0deadlock\u00a0between\u00a0the Anglo-Saxons and other peoples in Britain.\u00a0Then in the mid-sixth century, something happens to allow the Anglo-Saxons to break out and run the table all the way to what will become the Scottish frontier in the north and\u00a0the Welsh frontier\u00a0in the west.<\/p>\n

A year that sticks out in the ice cores and pollen records and tree ring chronologies is about 540 A.D. Something catastrophically awful happened then. Maybe a volcanic eruption, \u00a0or meteor or comet strike. There are terrible suggestions of economic problems and economic crisis, and probably renewed famine. It is intriguing that the Anglo-Saxon invasions might be bookended by environmental crisis and famine.<\/p>\n

Because we are now in a period of apparent climate change, does it inspire scholars\u00a0to look at the past through the lens of climate?<\/strong><\/p>\n

When secondary-school educators adopt a topic such as abrupt climate change and use it in their classes, that creates an interest and, in a sense,\u00a0a market for that idea. When graduate schools focus on\u00a0a topic, this\u00a0perpetuates study of that topic\u00a0topic and related interests. Then the products of graduate schools teach in colleges. Inevitably, present concerns are brought back to the study of the\u00a0past, sometimes with good relevance, sometimes not. It\u2019s a good example of how the present always influences the investigations of the past.<\/p>\n

In all honesty, however, when I started looking at the climate angle and the end of Roman Britain,\u00a0popular\u00a0issues of global warming were not at all present.<\/p>\n

You’re\u00a0a Texan. Are you amused or bemused by the Puritanical devotion to the Red Sox, and by your colleague Peg Creighton\u2019s Short Term course on \u201cRed Sox Nation\u201d?<\/strong><\/p>\n

To agitate my good friend,\u00a0I feign a contemptuous indifference to\u00a0the\u00a0Red Sox Nation. They\u2019re mercenaries with sticks. As a Texas Longhorn fan and a historian, however, I can understand how identity and sports teams work together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a continuation of the “Ask Me Another” conversation with Michael…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":104,"featured_media":0,"parent":631,"menu_order":1,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_dimp_site_id":"","_dimp_override_contact":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"class_list":["post-632","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/104"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=632"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/632\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12544,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/632\/revisions\/12544"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}