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ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF
THE DIGITAL ENVIRONMENTAL
HUMANITIES
Edited by Charles Travis, Deborah P. Dixon, Luke
Bergmann, Robert Legg, and Arlene Crampsie
First published 2023
ISBN: 978-0-367-53663-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-53669-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-08279-8 (ebk)
1
COWBOYS, COD, CLIMATE,
AND CONFLICT
Navigations in the Digital Environmental
Humanities
Charles Travis, Poul Holm, Francis Ludlow, Conor Kostick,
Rhonda McGovern, and John Nicholls
(CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082798-3
17
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082798-3
Introduction
The digital engages five broad research strands emerging in the humanities: firstly, the creation
of web-based collections, archives, and text-encoding initiatives; secondly, the reading and anal-
ysis of electronic hypertexts; thirdly, the application of geospatial and discursive mapping and
coding technologies; fourthly, approaches deploying gaming and 3D immersive visualisations;
and fifthly, the explosive growth of big data, social computing, crowdsourcing, and networking
opportunities (Holm, Jarrick, and Scott 2015). Digitally enabled syntheses between old (books,
archives, maps, paintings, film, etc.) and new types of media (qualitative analysis software, geo-
graphic information systems [GIS], social media, gaming and virtual reality platforms, etc.) are
becoming increasingly salient to the study of human-environmental relations. In turn, research
and teaching initiatives coalescing under the umbrella of the DEH are beginning to address three
interrelated phenomena characteristic of the 21st century: the digital revolution, global warm-
ing, and sociopolitical agency related to environmental change (Travis 2018). In this milieu, the
“new human condition,” to crib a phrase from the political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1961,
59), finds that “the world we have come to live in . . . is much more determined by [humans]
acting into nature, creating natural processes and directing them into the human artifice and the
realm of human aairs.”
Concerns of the DEH include, firstly, how we come to know – with masses of information
becoming increasingly available in diverse forms and platform – and secondly, how we work –
in collaborative, “glocally” scaled endeavours that integrate physical and virtual environments
which are changing techniques, workflows, and the ontology of research and teaching practices –
and thirdly, how we understand – as cybernetic tools and methodologies provide radically new
insights into and integrations of “old analogue,” “new digital,” and “natural archival” types of
data. These concerns inform the three DEH case studies featured in this chapter. The first oers
a geo-literary eco-digital geo-hermeneutic on 19th-century US expansion and environmental
degradation in the American West; the second oers a “data canon” precis on the North Atlantic
1
COWBOYS, COD, CLIMATE,
AND CONFLICT
Navigations in the Digital Environmental
Humanities
Charles Travis, Poul Holm, Francis Ludlow, Conor Kostick,
Rhonda McGovern, and John Nicholls
Charles Travis et al.
18
“Fish Revolution” between 1500 and 1800; and the third features computer-automated readings
of ancient astronomical diaries to analyse ancient relations between climate and conflict in the
Fertile Crescent kingdoms of Babylon and Assyria.
Larry McMurtry’s Literary Geography: Eco-Digital
Geo-hermeneutics (Charles Travis)
This project engages a panoramic literary geography of the 19th-century American West
depicted in a tetralogy of novels by the Texas author Larry McMurtry (1936–2021) collected
under the title of the Lonesome Dove Chronicles (2010). Humanities geographical information
systems (HumGIS) applications were deployed to explore McMurtry’s literary perceptions and
representations of the American Southwest and Rocky Mountain West during the expansion
of the United States in the 19th century. The Larry McMurtry’s Literary Geography (LMLG) pro-
ject funded by the University of North Texas Libraries at McMurtry’s alma mater draws on the
Portal to Texas History digital data collection to perform an eco-digital geo-hermeneutics on his
collective works.1
McMurtry’s saga on the closing of the American West, McMurtry borrowed character tropes
from Miguel de Cervantes’(1547–1616) Don Quixote (1605–1615) to depict the lives of Augustus
“Gus” McRae, a raconteur from Tennessee, and his stolid partner, Woodrow Call, and recount
their days as filibusters, Texas Rangers, and cowmen. McMurtry observes that the “crazy old
knight and the peasant pragmatist” comprised “an essential pair” and were “the ultimate source
of Gus and Call” (McMurtry 2008, 10). The duo’s rambles through the American Southwest
and Rocky Mountain West regions during the expansion of the United States in the 19th cen-
tury were inspired in part by Charles Goodnight (1836–1929) and Oliver Loving’s (1812–1867)
pioneering cattle drive from Texas to Montana in 1866. The Chronicles spans five decades of
western historical and cultural geography, despite chronological slippages between the four nov-
els that comprise it. It commences in the 1840s with Dead Man’s Walk (1995), then spans the
1850s–1860s in Comanche Moon (1997). Its titular novel, Lonesome Dove (1985), ranges from the
late 1870s, and The Streets of Laredo (1993), the Chronicles’ concluding work, is set in the 1890s.
By navigating the online 3D Google Earth tours of the four novels on the LMLG project
page, one can journey with Gus and Call as Santa Fe filibusters, and Texas Rangers and
join their cattle drive from Texas to Montana (Figure 1.1). Reading the Chronicles while
navigating the Goggle Earth tours illuminates an observation Annie Proulx (2008, 8) made
in Dangerous Ground: Landscape in American Fiction on the experience of a “viewer/writer/
reader” of a text who
stands metaphorically in both the unwritten and the written landscapes, enters the
territory on the page the same time it is created in the mind – a profound involvement
with place through real three dimensional landscapes and the described and imagined
landscape.
By zooming in and out on the Google Earth tours, a reader can hop from Mexico City to the
Rio Grande in south Texas and jump to the west of the Pecos River and the Great Plains in
the Oklahoma and Kansas Territories. One can traverse the Palo Duro Canyon, the arid Llano
Estacado (Staked Plains) of west Texas, cross the Powder River basin of Wyoming and ford the
Missouri River to the lush pastures of the Milk River Valley in northwestern Montana. The
historian John Lewis Gaddis (2011, 48) notes that the most distinctive characteristics of Russian
novelist Leo Tolstoy’s (1869) epic War and Peace (Война и миръ) are “the great shifts of scale that
Cowboys, Cod, Climate, and Conflict
19
take place within it.” Tolstoy, Gaddis writes, “zooms out . . . to show us great armies sweeping
across Europe, and the back in to focus on . . . the ordinary soldier’s point of view,” concluding
“Google Earth, for all its own zooming in and zooming out, has nothing on Tolstoy.” The Chron-
icles encompasses similar shifts in scale, and though accepting Gaddis’ point, reading McMurtry’s
work in concert with the Google Earth tours, one can undertake an eco-digital geo-hermeneutic
journey across the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains.
Proulx (2008, 7) defines a “deep landscape novel” as a work “in which the story that unfolds
can only happen . . . where it happens.” The Chronicles adheres to Proulx’s classification and “deep
mapping” concepts juxtaposing textual, virtual, and actual landscapes that provide heuristics to
integrate literary, cultural, and historical geography with HumGIS methods and literary and
textual studies and conduct this chapter’s eco-digital geo-hermeneutics on McMurtry’s works. By
incorporating a “reflexivity that acknowledges how engaged human agents build spatially framed
identities and aspirations out of imagination and memory,” deep mapping techniques deployed
in the creation of the Google Earth tours (Figure 1.2) illuminate “how the multiple perspectives
constitute a spatial narrative that complements the prose narrative traditionally employed by
humanists” (Bodenhamer, Harris, and Corrigan 2015, 20; Travis 2020a, 2020b).
By navigating across the tours’ remotely sensed landscapes, readers can hermeneutically trans-
pose the Chronicles’ apocalyptic sunsets, raging rivers, majestic cloud-filled horizons, dew-laden
mornings, alkaline badlands, bualo skull pyramid racks, and grasshopper swarms on the digit-
ised environments produced by a Landsat/Copernicus satellite lens. In addition, one can locate
in the tours where deadly biblical scale dust, hail, and lighting storms kill one cowhand and a
poisonous nest of moccasin vipers kills another – boys just on the cusp of manhood, never to
partake of the ritual pleasures of life in the saloons and bordellos of Ogallala, Nebraska, a place
Gus describes as the “Sodom of the Plains” (McMurtry 2010, 1313). In this regard, McMurtry’s
Figure 1.1 Homepage of the Lonesome Dove Google Earth tour.
Source: The Portal to Texas History and Charles Travis.
Charles Travis et al.
20
Chronicles, like Cervantes’ Don Quixote, “does not disentangle the story from the history, but
points its telescope at the ill-defined frontier itself” (Wardropper 1965, 5). Contemplating the
settlement of the United States west of the Mississippi River, McMurtry (1990) observes,
To understand the westward expansion, one needs not merely the explorer and the
scientist, but the artist as well. From the beginning artists were part of the enterprise –
and a vital part of it, for it was the artists, rather more even than the explorers or the
scientists, who ended up selling the West to the East. To a great extent that there was
a West of the imagination – and this was the West that most Americans knew – it was
the artists, not the pioneers, who created it.
McMurtry’s writing weaves together Gaelic and Indigenous “folklore and American frontier
history” and storytelling to depict transgressions of “physical, psychic, and geographical borders”
symbolised in the “Western” as “a simple adobe wall, an otherworldly dimension, or a moun-
tain chain” (Quintelli-Neary 2004, 44). It is not a stretch of the imagination to hear echoes
of the seventh-century Irish epic Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley) in McMurtry’s
storylines. In the Chronicles, the Mexican-American War (1846–1848) and American Civil War
(1861–1865) manifest as distant thunder over the narrative horizon of its four novels. The US
Army and Plains Indian Wars (1865–1890) and General George Armstrong Custer’s denoue-
ment at Little Big-Horn (1876) are also depicted peripherally.
In contrast, McMurtry’s fictive renderings of the freebooting 1841–1842 Texan–Santa Fe
and Mier Expeditions (Dead Man’s Walk), the Texas Ranger–Comanche Wars with the Penateka
war chief Bualo Hump between 1850–1870 (Comanche Moon), Goodnight and Loving’s 1866
pioneering cattle drive (Lonesome Dove), and the rise of the Railroad Barons in the 1880s–1890s
(Streets of Laredo) provide period detail, if not pedantic history. In the Chronicles, McMurtry
Figure 1.2 3D Google Earth tours of a Comanche bear hunt on the edge of the Llano Estacado, Road of
Bualo Bones in the Canadian River basin, and Great Plains grasshopper swarm, featured on
The Larry McMurtry’s Literary Geography project page.
Source: Larry McMurtry and Charles Travis.
Cowboys, Cod, Climate, and Conflict
21
(2010, 1203) depicts one of Gus’ rueful reflections on the “closing” of the Western “frontier”
as a panoramic coda:
In the north, the Army had finally taken the fight against the Comanches away from
the Rangers and had nearly finished it. . . . After the [American civil] war, the cattle
market came into existence and the big landowners in south Texas began to make up
herds and trail them north to the Kansas railheads. Once the cattle became the game
. . . he and Call quit rangering. It was no trouble for them to cross the river and bring
back a few hundred head to sell . . . they had roved too long, Augustus concluded. . . .
They were people of the horse, not of the town; in that they were more like the
Comanches than Call would ever have admitted.
In his epic poem Cycle of the West (1919–1941), Nebraska poet laureate John G. Neihardt
(1881–1973) portrayed the industrial re-territorialisation of the Great Plains from an Indigenous
perspective:
In all this wild beginning; saw with fear
Ancestral pastures gutted by the plow,
The bison harried ceaselessly, and how
They dwindled moon by moon . . . (2018, 315)
Neihardt’s poem cycle imparts “the last great fight for the bison pastures of the Plains between
the westering white men and the prairie tribes” as “the struggle for the right of way between
the Missouri River and the Pacific ocean” (Miller 1928, 125). Though Indigenous subsistence
hunts did contribute to winnowing the massive herds, in particular the culls of American bualo
hunters, in search of hides and the incidental “sport” of easterners who shot the animals for
amusement from passing trains, dwarfed the bison harvests of the Great Plains tribes. Ironically,
the explorer Charles Frémont stated that bison trails should direct the US transcontinental rail-
way in the Rocky Mountain West, arguing “that the bualo was the best engineer, because he
found that the great herds when going North for the winter crossed the upper passes, following
the line of least resistance” (Rogers 1905, 272). McMurtry’s Chronicles intertextually echoes
the biogeographical destruction of the North American species lamented in Neihardt’s verses.
During a cattle drive, Gus is stopped in his tracks by the desolation in the Canadian River basin
wrought by hunters and the industrial east’s market for “bualo coats”:
[He] was amazed to see an enormous pyramid of bualo bones perhaps fifty yards from
the water. The bones were piled so high. . . . Down the river a quarter of a mile there
was another pyramid, just as large. . . . He saw five pyramids of bones between the
crossing and Aus Frank’s camp, each containing several tons of bones.
(McMurtry 2010, 1567)
Another example of McMurtry’s biogeographical eye is his depiction of a massive grasshop-
per swarm on the Great Plains. The extinct Rocky Mountain locust (Melanoplus spretus) once
covered the West in leviathan swarms until the end of the 19th century. One famous Nebraska
sighting in 1874 was estimated to range 198,000 square miles in size, weigh 27.5 million tons
and speculated to comprise 12.5 trillion insects (Garcia 2000). In McMurtry’s cattle-drive novel
Lonesome Dove, the Hat Creek crew find themselves on the Great Plains in high summer when
they spy a towering dark cloud looming on the horizon. The grasshopper swarm, vivid and
Charles Travis et al.
22
tactile in McMurtry’s depiction, revives memories of 19th-century extinctions like the passenger
pigeon:
The sound the brown cloud made had become a little louder, but was still far away and
indefinable. Suddenly Augustus realized what it was. “Good lord,” he said. “It’s grass-
hoppers, Lorie.” . . . The cloud covered the plain in front of them from the ground far
up in the air. It was blotting out the ground as if a cover were being pulled over it. . . .
The hum they made as they spread over the prairie grass was so loud Lorena had to
grit her teeth. . . . The cowboys who saw the cloud while on horseback were mostly
terrified. . . . The sunshine glinted strangely o the millions of insects.
(McMurtry 2010, 1657)
The historical geography described in the Chronicles maps out the expanding borders of the
United States from the 1840s to the 1890s. During this period, the statistical cartography of
the US Census Bureau (Figure 1.3) enumerated the lower 48 states, and the Indigenous and colo-
nial conquistador trails of the West were transformed into an industrial webbing of railway lines,
telegraph wires, and steamboat routes which contributed to populating and re- territorialising
the natural and cultural landscapes of the once North American frontier.
Socially, McMurtry compares Lonesome Dove to George Eliot’s (1819–1880) provincial Brit-
ish Midlands novel Middlemarch (1871–1872), set in 1831 during agricultural and parliamentary
reforms dominated by the “technological and empiricist practices of an expanding capitalism”
and ensuing industrial re-territorialisation. Middlemarch, historically contextualised by emerg-
ing English railways, the accession of King William IV and the passage of the Whig-sponsored
1832 Great Reform Act by the British Parliament, is also in a period that finds railway survey-
ors mapping rural landscapes meeting violent resistance from local farmers (Breen 1993, 48;
Walton 1994).
In turn, the Chronicles counter the east-to-west geographical teleology under pinning the
spatial historiographies of American expansion. The historian Patricia Limerick (1992, 1022)
called for a revision of “east-to-west process” geo-historiographical model of US exploration
and settlement by recognising the prior presence of Indigenous communities and the northward,
Figure 1.3 Railway and urban population expansion in the American West, 1860–1900.
Source: United States Census Bureau Data 1860 and 1900, sourced from Steven Manson, Jonathan
Schroeder, David Van Riper, and Steven Ruggles. IPUMS National Historical Geographic Information System:
Version 14.0 (Database). Minneapolis, MN: IPUMS. 2019; Railroad Networks 1870–1890. Jeremy Atack,
“Historical Geographic Information Systems (GIS) database of U.S. Railroads and Steamboat Routes for 1860,
1900.” Maps: Charles Travis.
Cowboys, Cod, Climate, and Conflict
23
southward, and eastward migrations of peoples from Mexico, Canada, and Asia. The Google
Earth tour mappings of McMurtry’s tetralogy illustrate (Figure 1.4 a and b) that the geographical
arcs of the Chronicles run on a south-to-north axis from inside Mexico to the Canadian border
rather than along the traditional east-to-west axis portrayed in John Gast’s (1842–1896) 1872
painting American Progress or by historian Frederick Jackson Turner (1861–1932), who asked the
audience of his 1893 address The Significance of the Frontier in American History to
[s]tand at Cumberland Gap and watch the procession of civilization, marching single
file – the bualo following the trail to the salt springs, the Indian, the fur-trader and
hunter, the cattle-raiser, the pioneer farmer – and the frontier has passed by. Stand at
South Pass in the Rockies a century later and see the same procession.
(Turner 1893)
However, Herbert Bolton (1870–1953), Turner’s student, viewed US history from a hemispheric
perspective in The Epic of Greater America (1933). Arguing that traditional historiography obscured
subjects that “seemed secondary,” Bolton contends that through a “borderland” heuristic lens,
such narratives become “outstanding and primary” and vital to understanding the cultures that
created the United States (1933, 473–74). In regards to American tabula rasas concerning the West
and frontier, Limerick states, “The notion of a pristine wilderness is deservedly in tatters; the
discoverers now appear as late arrivals in an already fully occupied and much aected landscape”
(1992, 1022). She recommends “to think of the West as a place – as many complicated environ-
ments occupied by natives who considered their homelands to be the center, not the edge” (1987,
26), in addition to a physical landscape that is “actual, material, and substantial – something in the
soil, a set of actual places . . . holding layer upon layer of memory” (2000, 28).
Furthermore, Walter M. Kollmorgen (1969, 216–17) notes that the “early range cattle indus-
try of the West” depicted in Lonesome Dove “had its antecedents in the pastoral activities of
Spanish America and, more remotely, in the meseta of Spain,” the high Castilian plateau of La
Mancha, where Cervantes set his novel Don Quixote. Gus and Call, as American reincarnations
of the Errant Knight and Sancho Panza, illustrate Bolton’s remapping of the West as a “meeting
place and fusing place of two streams of European civilization, one coming from the south, and
the other from the north” (Hämäläinen and Truett 2011, 341).
The geonarrative trajectory (Figure 1.4) of the Chronicles ranging from Mexico City in the
south to Montana’s Milk River Valley in the north parallels Bolton and Limerick’s perspectives,
as well as Pekka Hämäläinen’s observation that “the rise of Plains Indian horse cultures along
an orientation of grasslands, which meant that the northward spreading frontier crossed several
climatic belts” (2003, 835) and its temporal setting intersects with the period during which the
Industrial Revolution in England was catastrophically unsettling the agrarian and labour market
economies of the British Isles. Prime examples include the Scottish Highland Clearances in the
18th and 19th centuries in the shadow of the 1746 Jacobite loss at the Battle of Culloden and
the 1848 Irish Famine. Marguerite Quintelli-Neary (2004, 22) observes that such events caused
the “despised races of the Celtic fringe” from “Wales, Ireland and Scotland” to migrate to Amer-
ica. Many headed West, beyond the boundaries of the Anglo-centric East Coast of the United
States. Woodrow Call, who claims fierce allegiance to his American identity, is a member of this
Celtic/Welsh/Gaelic “fringe” diaspora and is reminded by Gus, “You was born in Scotland . . .
I know they brought you over when you were still draggin’ on the tit, but that don’t make you
no less a Scot” (McMurtry 2010, 1144). McMurtry, a scion of a modest cattle-ranching family
based in Archer City, northeast Texas, drew inspiration for the Chronicles from his first-hand
experience with cattle, family memories, and genealogical lore, recalling:
Charles Travis et al.
24
Figure 1.4 (a) American Progress, 1872, by John Gast, east–west axis geonarrative teleology. (b) Composite
of Lonesome Dove Chronicles north–south axis geonarrative teleologies: Dead Man’s Walk,
Comanche Moon, Lonesome Dove, and Streets of Laredo.
Sources: Wikimedia Commons and Charles Travis.
Cowboys, Cod, Climate, and Conflict
25
Before I was out of high school I realized I was witnessing the dying of a way of life –
the rural, pastoral way of life. In the Southwest the best energies were no longer found
in the homeplace, or in the small towns; the cities required these energies and the cities
bought them. . . . The cattle range had become the oil patch; the dozer cap replaced
the Stetson almost overnight. The myth of the cowboy grew purer every year because
there were so few actual cowboys left to contradict it.
(McMurtry 2006, 11)
Like Cervantes’ depiction of the Plains of La Mancha, McMurtry parses the cultural and phys-
ical geographies of the American West, Southwest, and Rocky Mountain regions through the
cracked lenses of myth, fiction, and history.
The NorFish Project (Poul Holm and John Nicholls)
The lack of quantitative assessment of the early modern fisheries has caused fishery scientists and
historians to seriously underestimate the impact of pre-modern fishing eorts and total land-
ings of two main commercial fish species: North Atlantic cod and Northeast Atlantic herring.
This was the hypothesis of the NorFish project (Environmental History of the North Atlantic
Fisheries, 1500–1800) (Holm et al. 2019), which employed big data analytics, deep chart map-
ping, and historical ocean productivity, modelling on the basis of multinational, multi-archival
research (Travis and Holm 2016; Travis et al. 2020; Rankin and Holm 2019). In the end,
NorFish published data concerning 25 fisheries containing more than 6,000 landing records (of
Figure 1.5 North Atlantic cod harvest, 1520–1790. Spikes in 3D visualisation symbolise the number of
cod harvested by country per location during the period.
Source: P. Holm et al. 2021. Extractions of North Atlantic cod and herring, 1520–1790; cod image, Wikimedia
Commons. Graph and 3D visualisation: Charles Travis.
Charles Travis et al.
26
typically ten or more variable attributes) in addition to a historical cartography and qualitative
document database on the site Figshare (Holm et al. 2021). The project adopted a multidis-
ciplinary, humanities-led approach to establish a robust quantitative framework of maritime
extractions, supplies, and prices while also chronicling and parsing the subjective preferences
and political motivations of actors who took part in the early modern Fish Revolution across
the North Atlantic.
Employing DEH methods, NorFish discovered that marine extractions during the early
modern period, c. 1520–1790, vastly exceeded previous assumptions. The project found that
North Atlantic fisheries for cod and herring were of an order of magnitude comparable to
levels measured during the Industrial Revolution, challenging notions of relatively unimpacted
pre-industrial-age marine ecosystems. We identified two periods of Accelerated Marine Extrac-
tions (AME) respective episodes between 1540–1620 and 1750–1790, when growth rates of
fish landings were higher than human demographic growth. These periods of AME point to
the contribution and impacts of fish supplies on the expansion of early-modern societies (Holm
et al. 2021). Quantifying data extracted from historical sources, such as archival records, docu-
ments, and cartography, in addition to scholarly publications, is a multifaceted task. The NorFish
team was composed of multilingual historians (Scandinavian, German, Flemish, French, Span-
ish, Portuguese, and English), as well as archaeologists, biologists, geographers, and a mathema-
tician. All NorFish researchers produced data requiring curation by a full-time data manager.
In a landmark development, data on French and English, Northwest Atlantic cod fishing and
catches were rigorously analysed and processed. In turn, data derived from combinations of
archival materials, existing scholarly articles and academic datasets revealed large gaps created
by missing and/or unknown data points. To obtain viable estimates of actual catches, a novel
capacity trend method (CTM) was created. The application of CTM filled gaps in port records
by extracting a simple progression extrapolation (variable trend) from aggregated annual eort
values of primary ports to fill missing data on secondary ports and determine complete annual
capacity trends with transparent levels of detail and accuracy (Nicholls, Allaire, and Holm 2021).
Subsequently, CTM may be used to analyse other historical data series that have patchy coverage
across time and space.
While historians focus on deriving meaning, insights, and facts from qualitative and quanti-
tative information, a data manager seeks to impart a scientific taxonomy upon extracted data by
applying meticulous planning, verification, and formatting to transform raw data into thematic
datasets. Data are only as good as the quality of the research that led to their discovery and are
meaningless unless accurately cited and sourced. The project identified various types of data out-
puts that had to be constructed into viable thematic datasets and series and rendered compliant
with the NorFish data management framework. At the basic level, the Dublin Core (DubC)
standard was employed to formulate data strings into a static foundation of named fields that
were clearly defined and rooted in data management conventions. The NorFish cartography
data was handled in such a manner, enabling complex data strings to be established in simple,
well-defined terms (e.g. Travis et al. 2020; Rankin and Holm 2019). Similarly, the documented
outputs of the project, including large online databases, were formatted into DubC standard
structures to ensure transparency and simplicity.2
In addition, NorFish generated a large number of multidimensional datasets with spa-
tio-temporal and taxonomic elements. Interspersed with and contextualised by relevant quan-
titative and qualitative datum fragments, these sets contributed information for the project’s
various peer-reviewed publications. The DubC standard was applied to these sets to enable
data to reach its full and relevant research potential. The addition of specific species data in
Cowboys, Cod, Climate, and Conflict
27
taxonomic fields meant that the refined and robust Darwin Core (DwC) standard could be
superimposed on these datasets. DwC incorporates a rigorously validated taxonomic perspec-
tive into DubC, enabling clear metadata to be established and underlying data to be formatted
to optimal eect. A positive by-product of applying such criteria was that it conforms to de
facto standards for representing marine species data, attracting inclusion in the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s Ocean Biodiversity Information Systems
(UNESCO OBIS) big data platform. As the largest public domain resource of marine animal
species biodiversity in the world, the UNESCO OBIS includes 80 million individual records
from over 4,250 datasets, including well over 150 million measurements and facts.3 Further-
more, this criterion complements and supplements the Oceans Past Initiative (OPI) legacy
History of Marine Animal Populations (HMAP) data store, making OPI a major provider of
historical datasets.
A rigorous process of formatting, testing and verification was required to produce each
DwC-ready dataset. The NorFish data was placed in correct pre-defined fields, several of which
were exclusively created and required to ensure interaction with the larger DwC environment.
For NorFish, named data fields were matched exactly to data gathered from meticulous research.
Lists of data then had to be verified manually and computationally. Visual checks were carried
out to account for any obvious errors or omissions. This was followed by having the data run
through established DwC “R” programmed sequences to test various elements, such as the cor-
rect use of taxonomic naming conventions, viable coordinate locations, and temporal reliability.
Following any corrections and revisions that may have been necessary, the NorFish DwC data
were entered into an Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) established by the Global Biodiversity
Information Facility (GBIF). The data then followed yet another series of verifications and
checks before being harvested into the OBIS database.
While this level of detailed scrutiny provided clean data, it was also necessary to generate
supporting documentation so that the datasets could be accurately contextualised within their
historical settings. These documents provide anyone who accesses NorFish datasets with a full
description of the data fields but also provide datum sources and brief historical backgrounds for
clarity. Published academic articles and outputs from the NorFish data canon routinely reference
these datasets, which are integral to understanding the conclusions reached by the NorFish pro-
ject (Nicholls, Allaire, and Holm 2021).
The comprehensive documentation of historical North Atlantic fisheries enables future
researchers to ask questions previously considered unanswerable. An example of the enduring
value of NorFish’s data is a newfound clarity on changes in fish consumption preferences
from the late medieval to the early modern period. The most important human benefit of
elevated marine exploitation during this period was increased food security. The annual
consumption of herring and cod almost doubled during the 16th-century Fish Revolution,
reaching from 2.9 to 5.7 kilograms per capita by 1790. Indeed, total seafood consumption
in West Europe averaged 10 kilograms by 1790, but with significant regional dierences.
This amount stands in comparison with the global average fish consumption of close to 10
kilograms in 1960. Access to the cheap, dried protein oered by herring and cod was critical
to food security in pre-industrial societies. Dried or salted fish kept well and was generally
less expensive than beef during spring months when grain and meat stocks ran low. Con-
sequently, its increased availability likely played a significant role in the demographic rise of
modern Western Europe.
The NorFish project’s mixed-methods approach highlighted geographical shifts in fish-
ing from east to west, finding that herring was increasingly sourced from the North Sea
Charles Travis et al.
28
rather than the Baltic, while cod was harvested more predominantly from the Northwestern
Atlantic rather than its Northeastern waters. Geopolitically significant, this reorientation
was also discovered, occurring at regional levels, with fluctuations found in the Irish and
Celtic Seas, the Danish North Sea fisheries, the Baltic and the North Atlantic islands. As
fish shifted from being an expensive and limited resource in the late Middle Ages to a rel-
atively cheap and abundant commodity by early modern times, environmental and societal
changes ensued.
The Fish Revolution of the 1500s impacted demographics, politics, and market-driven
economies, with the strategic importance of the trade becoming evident to all major Western
European powers. Inverse eects of war and peacetime were reflected in fish stock increases
during periods of conflict as fishing slowed or halted. NorFish concludes that the “Great
Fishing Experiments” of the First and Second World Wars saw similar respites that increased
Newfoundland cod stocks during the Napoleonic Wars. Warfare largely mirrored downturns
in fishing and upturns in stocks. From the 1630s until the Treaties of Utrecht (1713–1714) – a
period of protracted wars – fish stocks rose as fishing fleets were pillaged or destroyed, leading
to lower catch landings. Fishing crews were often taken captive, with their vessels appropri-
ated for naval refitting and warfare. Volatility was the norm, with piracy and conflict in full
sway. Fish markets outside of European theatres of conflict fared slightly better, such as the
Newfoundland, Caribbean, and Iberian trade triangle, but cargo interceptions and attacks on
fishing grounds were commonplace. Despite these dangers, rising prices sometimes encour-
aged fishing crews to risk going to sea. Peace brought a steady rise in fishing eorts as relative
periods during the 16th and 18th centuries witnessed elevated marine extractions and ensuing
prosperity.
Impacts of climate change, as documented by fall in temperatures and increases in storms
late in the 17th century, more than likely had a negative impact on fishing eorts as fish
stocks fell due to the reduced abundance of zooplankton in the oceanic food chain. Addi-
tionally, predator-prey phenomena and volcanic eruptions may have contributed to the
geopolitical contexts of fisheries. The phenomenon of oscillating production levels between
Northwestern and Northeastern waters may potentially be explained by biophysical changes
across the North Atlantic. These questions will now be addressed on the basis of solid
evidence by the funded for a six-year period through 2027 by the European Research
Council.4 In this sense, NorFish is proof of concept that assembling a global environmental
history of humans and marine resources with contributions from various DEH methods
can indeed be undertaken.
The CLICAB Project (Francis Ludlow, Conor Kostick,
Rhonda McGovern)
The Climates of Conflict in Babylonia (CLICAB) project is an interdisciplinary venture that
considers evidence from natural and human archives using quantitative and qualitative meth-
ods to pursue two central hypotheses. Firstly, climatic changes, including periods of extreme
weather, influenced patterns of violence and conflict in the ancient Near East, thereby playing
a key role in this formative region and era of world history. Secondly, the nature of any linkage
between climate change, violence, and conflict varies through time and space according to
evolving socio-economic, political, cultural, and broader environmental contexts. To test these
hypotheses, the CLICAB project has focused upon the kingdoms of Assyria and Babylonia (cen-
tred in present-day Iraq and Syria) during the first millennium , with four aims.
Cowboys, Cod, Climate, and Conflict
29
First Aim: Reconstructing Assyrian and Babylonian
Hydroclimates
Written sources available for these Fertile Crescent kingdoms are rich with relevant observa-
tions, so producing new climatic reconstructions from such documents has been the project’s
first aim. Limited access to important environmental data due to regional conflicts and hydropol-
itics over water access (associated with dam building) have obstructed record-keeping and pro-
moted secrecy. As a result, records from ancient Babylon may provide longer and higher-quality
time series of variables, such as monthly Euphrates River levels, than do modern era data sources
(Yilmaz 1995; Vörösmarty, Fekete, and Tucker 1996; Slotsky 1997; Lein 1998; Kirschner and
Tiroch 2012; Huijs, Pirngruber, and van Leeuwen 2015). Ancient measurements were preserved
in “astronomical diaries” created by Babylonian court astronomers who systematically recorded
daily celestial and meteorological phenomena between the eighth and first centuries (Haubold,
Steele, and Stevens 2019). With few exceptions, the meteorological content of these diaries has
not been assessed for environmental reconstructions (Huijs, Pirngruber, and van Leeuwen 2015;
Sigl et al. 2015; Ludlow, Kostick, and Morris 2022). Categorisation and extraction of this data
for the first four centuries , the period in which surviving diaries are most heavily concen-
trated, forms the foundation of CLICAB’s climatic reconstructions.
More disparate sources, including annals and chronicles (e.g., Luckenbill 1924; Grayson
2000 [1975]; Glassner 2004; Budge 2009 [1902]), inscriptions (e.g., Piepkorn 1933; Nissen
2003), administrative records, personal and ocial correspondence (e.g., Parpola 1987; Lan-
franchi and Parpola 1990; Moran 1992; Hunger and Cole 1996; Parpola 2014), astrological
reports (e.g., Hunger 1992), and even some literary texts, such as epics and the Sumerian
city laments (e.g., Vanstiphout 1980), yield important data on the incidence and percep-
tions of meteorological and related environmental phenomena, in addition to incidences and
responses to societal stressors, such as epidemic disease, subsistence crises, migration, and
conflict (e.g., Kleber 2012; Radner 2015). While such sources cannot oer systematic obser-
vations as found in the diaries, collectively they oer greater chronological and geographical
span and scope, allowing the creation of a “master chronology of extreme weather, conflict
and societal stress” for the first millennium. CLICAB has to date surveyed 18 (of 21 presently
available) online volumes of the State Archives of Assyria, a landmark series that has published
many such sources.5 Overcoming challenges in using such materials requires methods from the
field of historical climatology, which sits at the intersection of climatology and environmental
history (Pfister 2007). The field’s methodological advances have involved identifying, cate-
gorising, and assessing the historical reliability of written descriptions of relevant phenomena
and quantifying such information for the purpose of reconstructing past climates. Even if not
explicitly using the term DEH, STEAM research by Ludlow and Travis (2019) and the “con-
silient” approaches of Izdebski et al. (2022), and others adopt such methods.
Although computerised content analysis applied to an ever-growing body of digitised his-
torical sources can empower all work in the humanities, automated close and distant reading
methods can also promote detachment from the source material and its historical-geographical
context, potentially undermining credible interpretations.6 However, this is not limited to the
digital age; for example, Thomas Short’s A General Chronology of the Air, Weather, Seasons, Meteors,
Etc. (1749), an infamous early modern work in historical climatology, was critiqued for paying
too little attention to the reliability and independence (or “witness status”) of its sources. Indeed
analogue or digital reconstruction biases are often compounded by inclusions of misdated, dupli-
cated, exaggerated, misidentified, fabricated, or otherwise dubious reports (Bell and Ogilvie
1978; Ogilvie and Farmer 1997).
Charles Travis et al.
30
While historical climatologists now widely stress the need for the assessment of source
reliability using methods from critical philology and literary textual and source analyses, a
persistent lack of practical guidance and case studies to meet this need exists. In addition,
positivist stances of many historical climatologists on determining source reliability rarely
acknowledge indeterminate cases, in addition to the subjectivity and potential for error on the
part of the assessor. In creating a chronology of extreme weather reports from the medieval
Irish Annals, Ludlow (2010) established a simple scale of apparent reliability (AP) reflecting this
reality. Allowing readers to see all potentially relevant reports annotated by the AP scale rather
than silently excluding those reports deemed unreliable opens avenues for further analysis if a
report proves to be genuine or receives independent corroboration, in addition to providing
insight into how chroniclers perceived and interpreted natural phenomena.
Informed by this work, CLICAB has designed a schema for coding and extracting the con-
tent of the astronomical diaries and more disparate sources. Enhanced by DEH-relevant tex-
tual analysis and encoding tools, the schema provides the means to reconstruct precipitation,
cloudiness, atmospheric opacity, and wind direction (Figure 1.6) alongside ancient Euphrates
River levels and other regional hydroclimatic variables. It was also recognised that climactic
records could be considered “politically sensitive” as celestial and terrestrial phenomena such as
comets, eclipses, earthquakes, storms, floods, and droughts were considered potential omens in
the Ancient Near East that might portend fortune or misfortune for rulers and their societies.
It was thus posited that such phenomena might influence what court astronomers recorded in
the diaries, potentially impacting the completeness and type of content recorded. For example,
after the Neo-Babylonian Empire fell to the Persians in 539 , rulers such as Darius III and
Xerxes were known to have decommissioned temples and removed priests and scribes in a delib-
erate snub to the Babylonian way of life and a shift away from “cuneiform culture” (Robson 2019).
Figure 1.6 Wind Direction Observations, Astronomical Diaries 652–61 . exemplifies the meteorological
data abundantly reported in the surviving diaries, with this figure following the categories
oered by the astronomical diaries themselves.
Source: Rhonda McGovern (provisional data).
Cowboys, Cod, Climate, and Conflict
31
Thus, attention has been paid to the historical context in which the diaries were recorded, nuances
in meaning, the likely intent of the diarists and their patrons, their intended audiences, and their
general worldview. This is key to assessing the reliability of any report or observation and speaks
to the issue of “representivity” in climatic reconstruction, which concerns how well any observed
trends, such as in reports of heavy rainfall (or precipitation indices based upon combined reports of
rainfall, flooding, drought, etc.), describe actual occurrences through time (Ludlow 2010, 2012).
The possibility exists that derived trends will be distorted by multiple such factors, as well as the
more obvious existence or lack of diaries surviving from certain periods. Such distortions can be
potentially controlled statistically, and CLICAB has paid considerable attention to the coding of
missing data, whether arising from lost diaries, damage to existing diaries, or silent changes in the
type and volume of content even when diaries are available and apparently undamaged (Figure 1.7).
Second Aim: Assessing Associations between Climate,
Conflict and Violence
Establishing whether extreme weather and abrupt climatic changes are statistically associated
with violence and conflict in the first millennium kingdoms of Babylonia and Assyria is the
project’s second aim. CLICAB’s team holds considerable experience in categorising and quan-
tifying violence documented in medieval Ireland and ancient Egypt (e.g. Ludlow and Manning
2016; Manning et al. 2017; Ludlow and Travis 2019), as well as societal stresses (e.g. famine,
epidemic disease, political transitions, mass migrations) potentially generative or resulting from
Figure 1.7 Standardised frequency plot (in z-scores on the vertical axis) for weather and total coverage (i.e.,
including non-weather reports) provided per year (305–218 ) from surviving astronomical
diaries, alongside transitions between Fertile Crescent kings. Higher positive values signify
greater coverage, and vice versa.
Plot: Francis Ludlow and Rhonda McGovern.
Charles Travis et al.
32
violence and conflict as documented in medieval European, Near Eastern, and Chinese annals
and chronicles (Ludlow et al. 2013; Kostick and Ludlow 2015; Sigl et al. 2015; Gao et al. 2016;
Kostick and Ludlow 2019). A source-critical approach is again needed here to avoid either treat-
ing the material without due caution or erroneously dismissing it as unreliable.
In categorising and quantifying violence and conflict, the project also aims to capture
valuable nuance from the sources concerning the scope and scale of war, civil war, and
forced mass population transportations. The Neo-Assyrian kings (and those of other regional
polities) undertook military campaigns on an annual basis to gather tribute, restore order,
or expand their territories. To achieve a more meaningful insight into the scope, intensity,
and impact of these campaigns, CLICAB is developing a simple schema to denote whether
a given campaign was minor – the ruler marching armies to unreliable cities to collect rev-
enue – or represented a massive upheaval such as when the major regional powers of Elam
and Assyria attempted to decisively eliminate each other by mobilising significant resources.
Our working schema is presently a simple ordinal scale of 1 to 3, following straightforward
criteria that return similar decisions by dierent assessors. While it is possible to adopt a finer
scale to capture more detailed variations of the campaigns (e.g. a scale of 1 to 10), when this
was trialled, assessors made increasingly subjective judgements – with greater disagreement
even when apparently adhering to the same criteria. The advantage of such quantification
methods when complemented by qualitative practice is that they provide a bird’s eye view of
change across times and places, enabling statistical comparisons with inherently quantitative
climatic data sourced from natural archives.
CLICAB is also examining the use of sudden climatic “shocks” as “tests” of human response
to reveal prevailing vulnerabilities and resilience. Dispersed through time, such shocks can let
us examine whether and how responses evolve according to changing economic, political,
and cultural contexts. An analysis based upon repurposing the superposed epoch analysis
(SEA) method (used on continuous time-series studies of natural phenomena like tree-ring
growth values) has already been undertaken by CLICAB. Discrete human events such as the
incidence of revolts or the collapse of kingdoms/dynasties occurring across a range of years
after a climatic shock have, for example, already been examined in this manner (Manning
et al. 2017; Gao et al. 2021). The project employs this approach to assess whether associations
exist between the timing of four climate-altering explosive volcanic eruptions dated 750,
723, 703, and 676 : (Cole-Dai et al. 2021) and counts of documented violence, conflict,
and other societal stresses between 750 and 650 . Initial results illustrate a clear increase in
the average of these counts in the first decade following these eruptions (Figure 1.8). While
this increase may have occurred simply by chance, the advantage of a quantitative approach
is the ability to calculate the likelihood that the observed counts occurred randomly or not.
Statistical analysis suggested that there was less than a 10% chance that elevated counts in
the years immediately following the eruptions were random. Forthcoming ice core volcanic
reconstructions will provide more event dates to examine. These, combined with an exam-
ination of violence, conflict and stressors by individual type, as well as the application of the
previously described scale of intensity, will provide a more nuanced analysis. This will help
determine whether the manner of sociopolitical conflict responses observed in Figure 1.8 are
maintained, say, for all 50-year sub-periods across a broader time range or are notably absent
or reduced for particular periods and/or types of violence. This will, in turn, provide clues as
to potential changes in underlying socio-economic and political contexts that might promote
greater environmental resilience and oer new questions to be pursued by scrutinising docu-
mentary and archaeological evidence.
Cowboys, Cod, Climate, and Conflict
33
Third and Fourth Aims: Pathways from Climate to Conflict
and Importance of Historical Context
CLICAB’s third and fourth aims are to delineate pathways by which climatic changes may have
catalysed violence and conflict and assess if and how ancient Near Eastern societies developed
mitigation strategies depending on their changing historical contexts. The project’s contribu-
tion to The Cambridge World History of Genocide (Ludlow, Kostick, and Morris 2022) illustrates
the latter’s importance in mediating and or amplifying climatic influences by providing new
insights into the fall of the Kingdom of Israel in 722 . In that year, a revolution occurred in
Assyria, possibly leading to the death of King Shalmaneser V and a likely opportunistic attempt
by Israel to escape Assyrian domination (put simply). But a quick internal consolidation of
power by the new Assyrian king Sargon II crushed the rebellion, and the population of Israel
was dispersed by mass transportation (Frahm 2019; Hasegawa 2019). Until now, discussions
of the pathways by which such violence and conflict erupted have largely excluded climate.
Indeed, historian Bob Becking (2019, 23) states that
climate in the Iron Age II–III period remained stable in ancient Israel. We can there-
fore assume that no specific impulses from a (sudden) change in climate would have
influenced the course of events leading to the end of the kingdom.
Figure 1.8 Superposed epoch analysis, showing the mean frequency of documented conflict and societal
stress counts for each of the 20 years before four major volcanic eruptions seen in polar
(Antarctic) ice cores (i.e. years −20 to −1 on the horizontal axis), the years of these eruptions
(i.e. year 0, horizontal axis), and each of the 20 years following (i.e. years 1 to 20, horizontal
axis). The average frequencies are notably elevated in the first decade following these eruptions,
with the probability of observing such high values at random being less than 10%. Figure
redrawn after Ludlow, Kostick, and Morris (2022).
Charles Travis et al.
34
However, recent ice core data from Antarctica identifies a massive, possibly tropical volcanic
eruption in approximately 723 (Cole-Dai et al. 2021).7 The severe drop in temperature
and disruption of seasonal precipitation patterns that likely followed, alongside the introduction
of new, onerous taxes, plausibly acted as catalysts for internal revolt in Assyria. This, it may be
posited, raised existential questions for the ruling elite of the Kingdom of Israel – was the time
right to take advantage of the Assyrian crisis and risk challenging their subordinate position?
Ultimately, their decision to do so can therefore be hypothesized as an indirect and partial
outcome of the eruption but also a fatal misjudgment leading to the destruction of Israel. This
case study is only one example of previously unobserved coincidences between major historical
events in the ancient Fertile Crescent region and the incidence of extreme weather and abrupt
climate changes documented in natural archives such as ice cores and cave speleothems. The
detailed reconstruction of the historical Near Eastern climate (which now stands to be consid-
erably advanced by the DEH-informed study of the astronomical diaries) is likely to reveal fur-
ther such coincidences, as well as prove to be relevant for present climate change concerns. For
example, explosive volcanic eruptions are known to impact river flow in many regions, but the
size and number of eruptions in the modern period are limited by historical standards (Iles and
Hegeral 2015). Examining responses to eruptions in the ancient Near East may thus prove sali-
ent to water supply issues following the next large contemporary eruption in an already acutely
hydro- sensitive region. We hope that the CLICAB project showcases how a self-reflective and
self-critical “digital” environmental humanities can co-produce new insights with colleagues
(and methods and sources) from the natural sciences into societal vulnerabilities and resiliencies
to environmental change.
Conclusion
As a liminal field, the DEH is an adaption to 21st-century cybernetic, climactic, and sociopo-
litical transformations. Featuring innovative approaches, research, and pedagogical questions,
the DEH promotes the study of past and present human-environmental relations in order
to cultivate better understanding of future potential and sustainable paths. The case studies
featured in this chapter showcase how theory, techniques, and scholarship in literary geogra-
phy, open-source geospatial hermeneutics, maritime environmental history, data taxonomies,
historical climatology, automated digital reading, and statistical analysis find confluence and
coherence in this emerging field. Collectively, the projects provide evidence that by no
means are the arts and humanities in “intellectual crisis” but rather are becoming increas-
ingly relevant to understanding how to address social, environmental, and digital threats and
opportunities of our “new human condition” (Holm and Travis 2017). Our generation has
been gifted with enormous computing power, including the means to inform and misinform
itself about the state of the world, not least on the causes and mitigatory practices concerning
human-induced climate change. The DEH may – and should – face up to the challenges
that humanity faces as we discover the true positive potential of our environmental-social-
political agency.
Acknowledgements
Charles Travis acknowledges funding from the University of North Texas Library, the Portal to
Texas Histor y Research Fellowship and the University of Texas, Arlington, COLA Faculty Research
Endowment. Poul Holm (principal investigator) and John Nicholls acknowledge support from a
European Research Council Synergy Grant (4-OCEANS project, grant agreement ID 951649).
Cowboys, Cod, Climate, and Conflict
35
Francis Ludlow (principal investigator), Conor Kostick, and Rhonda McGovern acknowledge
support from an Irish Research Council Laureate Award (CLICAB, Award IRCLA/2017/303),
and thank Joe Manning, Bert van der Spek, and Reinhard Pinrgruber for useful discussion.
Notes
1 Larry McMurtry’s Literary Geography (https://blog.uta.edu/travisc/research/larry-mcmurtrys-literary-ge-
ography) project features 3D Google Earth tours of the four novels that comprise the Lonesome Dove
Chronicles and Portal to Texas History (https://texashistory.unt.edu).
2 NorFish Platform: Databases & Cartography Hub (http://cehresearch.org/norfishplatform).
3 UNESCO OBIS (https://ioc.unesco.org/our-work/ocean-biodiversity-information-system).
4 4-OCEANS project (www.tcd.ie/tceh/4-oceans).
5 State Archives of Assyria Online (http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/saao).
6 In addition to exploiting text search and encoding software like MaxQDA and open-source alternatives,
CLICAB focuses on the complete “close reading” of texts to appreciate the context in which project-rel-
evant references to drought or other phenomena are recorded.
7 Personal communication: Michael Sigl, University of Bern, 2020. Eruption location is important in
determining climatic impacts.
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