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cised for displacing the role of human agency in the crises and hence any direct
blame for the tragedies that befell the subjects of the new colonies. (McNeill, 2003,
p. 33). Moreover, more recent multidisciplinary work discussed in the next section,
is serving to challenge other aspects of the theory more fundamentally.
Arguably what's now being termed a 'new' environmental history adopts a
nuanced take on agency, highlighting nature as a 'co-creator' of the past, and seeing
nature and society as interdependent, interactive and 'causally bound up in a nar-
rative of decline and potential renewal' (Walton, 2001, p. 903). Acknowledging
these interdependencies is of course important, but the real diffi culty for the envi-
ronmental historian lies in disentangling these different agents of change from the
signals that each leaves in the historical record and identifying the respective role
that each may have played individually or in combination in modifying the environ-
ment. Problems arise because past human infl uences are normally cumulative, with
different stages of activity being superimposed upon each other, and upon any
impacts and changes associated with climate (Russell, 1997), adding a further degree
of complexity. An additional obstacle is the ubiquity of humanised landscapes, thus
rendering it very diffi cult to distinguish or decipher the independent infl uence of
non-human agents of change.
A wide range of methods to explore issues of agency do exist. Written records,
traces left on the landscape and analysis of sedimentary records, or so called geo-
archives, however, can provide some insight into the environments of the past and
how and why they may have been changed and might also shed light on the nature
of the relationship that humans might have had with their environment at different
points in the past. Moreover, by combining the latest scientifi c and archaeological
techniques with information gathered from documents, other areas of archaeology,
art, and ethnography, it is possible to identify the nature, type and specifi c impacts
of different diseases on society in the past. Detailed consideration of the potential
advantages, resolution and limitations of a variety of different approaches to such
'reconstructions' are outlined in detail elsewhere (see, for example, Roberts and
Manchester, 2007) but have traditionally been tools employed by physical and
historical geographers, historical ecologists, palaeobotanists and archaeologists
(McNeill, 2003).
To some extent geographers might be well placed, perhaps uniquely so, to
combine both social and physical scientifi c methodologies
within
the boundaries of
their discipline to similarly disentangle the relative role of humans and climate in
environmental change in a variety of geographical contexts. Davies et al
.
,
(2004),
for example, have demonstrated the immense potential of integrating both human
geography and physical geography approaches and data (palaeolimnological and
archival material) to disentangle complex drought-society relationships in west
central Mexico over the last thousand years.
The combination of different methodological approaches, however, drawn from
multiple disciplines can perhaps shed the most light on the intractable problem of
agency, as the two following examples drawn from studies of Scottish environmen-
tal history reveal. Geographers and archaeologists, for example, have effectively
combined their expertise to explore issues of agency in environmental modifi cation.
Edwards et al., (2007), for example, employed a variety of biotic and sedimentologi-
cal evidence to explore the respective impacts of climate and anthropogenic infl uence
on woodland cover in Scotland in the Late Holocene, while recent work by Dodg-
shon and Olsson (2006), combining historical geographical and biological (palaeo-
