Unravelling the Climate History of Southeast Africa

Speaker: Matthew Hannaford, University of Nottingham
Series: African Archaeology Group Seminar Series

Understanding patterns of climate variability and extremes prior to the availability of instrumental records requires reconstructions from the “archives of nature” and “archives of society”. Despite steadily increasing numbers of palaeoclimate reconstructions from southeast Africa, knowledge of past variability and particularly extremes remains hampered by the resolution and geographical coverage of available records. The relatively long documentary record in the area that forms present-day Mozambique provides an opportunity to investigate such patterns, especially rainfall and severe storms. In this seminar, I examine what written records tell us about past climates of southeast Africa from the sixteenth to early twentieth centuries through critical engagement with a breadth of documentary material gathered in archives in Africa, Europe and North America. I question the potential and limitations of these records for climate history and engage with the idea of “peak document” (McNeill 2020) to help open up broader, interdisciplinary conversations around the climate history of the region.

Matthew Hannaford is an Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham. His current UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship examines the shifting relationships between weather extremes, climate knowledges and adaptation amidst colonial intensification in southeast Africa during the 19th and 20th centuries. His related research interests include the history of food in southern and eastern Africa.