I am conducting research in climate history: the relationships between humans and climate in the past. My research investigates both side of this relationship: 1) how climatic changes have influenced human well-being and livelihoods in history and 2) how humans have adapted to past climatic changes and extremes.
My research interests include, among others, history of medieval and early modern Nordic countries, agricultural history, historical climatology, and interdisciplinarity between historical and climate sciences.
My research interests include, among others, history of medieval and early modern Nordic countries, agricultural history, historical climatology, and interdisciplinarity between historical and climate sciences.
less
InterestsView All (18)
Uploads
Papers by Heli Huhtamaa
With an example from 15th century Novgorod and surrounding regions, this paper aims to identify the environmental and social factors that made the livelihood vulnerable to weather extremes. In addition to contemporary sources, supplementary information on past meteorological events and livelihood strategies is drawn from archaeological, paleoecological and paleoclimatological studies.
A growing body of quantitative research has found relationship between contemporary climatic events and violent conflict across the world. Yet, as conflicts and crises can be affected by climatic events through multiple pathways that differ through space and time, existing frameworks to assess climatic influence on conflicts are challenging to apply to more distant past and lesser studied regions. Therefore, identifying possible causal connections between past climatic events and violent conflicts requires case-specific studies and qualitative approach.
The 1430s were one of the coldest decades of the last millennium in Europe and cold winters and short growing seasons caused famine and crises across the continent. In North-Europe, the 1430s is marked by recurrent social unrest and rebellions, including the Engelbrekt and David rebellions (1434–1436 and 1438–1439, respectively). Tradi-tionally these northern conflicts of the 1430s are considered to result from trade difficul-ties and heavy tax burden. Yet, the temporal correspondence between the extremely cool climatic trend and the northern rebellions arise a question whether these events could have been connected. With the case studies of Engelberkt and David rebellions, this paper discusses whether a causal connection between climatic anomalies and vio-lent conflicts can be established in late-medieval Sweden. In addition, the paper aims to assess the importance of internal social and economic factors over external environmental shocks in pre-industrial conflicts.
Assessing and identifying food system vulnerability to climate impacts, especially when written source material is scarce, requires an interdisciplinary approach. Here, the theoretical framework is drawn from various bodies of literature, such as landscape ecology and climate history, while different indicators of social and environmental vulnerability are gathered from historical, archaeological and paleoecological evidence. As different disciplines work with varying spatial and temporal frameworks, a special emphasis is laid on bringing social and environmental factors in compatible scales. By centering the research approach on reconstructing the food system vulnerability and its adaptive capacity in the fourteenth century North-East Europe, I thus evaluate if the region was afflicted by the Great Famine.