2012/02/27 by Fernando Domínguez‐Castro, J. M. Vaquero, Manuela Marín +2 · 3 citations
Earth and Planetary Sciences · #Tree-ring climate responses #Geology and Paleoclimatology Research #Archaeology and ancient environmental studies
paper · doi:10.1002/wea.835
openalex publication_date 2012/02/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
Trees, corals, ice cores and documentary \nevidence provide high-resolution proxies \nthat allow past climate to be reconstructed \n(Jones et al., 2009). Documentary evidence \nincludes all forms of written historical information \nabout past climate or weather, but \nits use for climate reconstruction is restricted \nto locations for which there is a rich documentary \nlegacy. Several climate analyses \nand reconstructions have been undertaken \nusing documentary evidence from Europe \n(Brázdil et al., 2005; 2010), North and South \nAmerica (Dupigny-Giroux and Mock, 2009; \nPrieto and García-Herrera, 2009; Neukom \net al., 2010), Asia (Ge et al., 2005; 2010; Aono \nand Kazui, 2008; Hirano and Mikami, 2008) \nand oceanic areas (García-Herrera et al., \n2005). The Islamic World is a region for \nwhich such sources could also be used to \nreconstruct past climate, as indeed they \nhave been widely used for astronomy and \ngeophysics. Astronomers have used the \nobservations made by Arab astronomers for \ncenturies, with some remarkable examples. \nHistorical eclipse observations, recorded by \nvarious ancient and mediaeval cultures \nincluding Arabs, have enabled changes in \nthe Earth’s rate of rotation to be monitored \nwith fair precision as far back as around \n700 AD (Stephenson, 2003). Rada and \nStephenson (1992) catalogued meteor \nshowers using mediaeval Arab chronicles \nand Ahn (2003) investigated the spatial distribution \nof meteor streams crossing the orbit of the Earth from the tenth to the fourteenth \ncenturies using chronicles from \nKorea, Japan, China, Arabia and Europe. \nDocumentary sources from Iberia have been \nused to identify and date such astronomical \nphenomena as eclipses and comets (Vernet, \n1982), naked-eye sunspots (Vaquero and \nGallego, 2002) and aurora sightings \n(Vaquero and Gallego, 2001). The work of \nBasurah (2006) provides descriptions for 18 \naurora displays on various dates at low latitudes \nin the Mediterranean area taken from \nIslamic chronicles (ninth to sixteenth centuries). \nIn seismology, Arabic chronicles \nwere extensively used to prepare the \nSeismic Catalogue of the Iberian Peninsula \n(Martínez and Mezcua, 2002) and to study \nseismic activity in Syria and Palestine \n(Ambraseseys, 2005). \nHowever, the use of these sources to \nrecover climate information is, to the best \nof our knowledge, still very limited (Bulliet, \n2009; Jones et al., 2009). Here we describe \na preliminary inquiry based on Arabic documentary \nsources from Iraq. We would stress \nthe antiquity of the documents used, with \ndates in the period 816–1009 AD. The \nsources consulted are Arabic chronicles that \nnarrate the social, political and religious history \nof different regions in a form very characteristic \nof Arab culture.