Practice question · Multiple choice
Environmental history relies on pollen cores, ice cores and tree rings. What did admitting these as sources change about the discipline?
Hints
- Ask what a pollen core can testify about that no document can.
- The definition of a source widened. What became sayable?
Show the answer
C. It extended history into periods with no documents at all
Why
A bog records the vegetation of a valley for ten thousand years with no scribe involved, so the past becomes legible where writing never reached. Option 4 inverts it: the same data has been used to refute determinist claims, by showing societies responding differently to identical climate events.
Practise Big History and Environmental History
The app has 4 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
More questions on Big History and Environmental History
- What does widening the frame to environmental and deep time actually buy a historian?
- How did the Black Death reorganize western European society?
- Complete the honest formulation.
- Why does a continent’s east–west axis matter for the diffusion of crops and animals?
- Why did Eurasian populations carry epidemic diseases that American populations did not?
- The majority of epidemic deaths in the Americas occurred after sustained European settlement, as a direct…
- Match each environmental event to its historical consequence.
- Sort each item: was it set by the environmental field of possibility, or was it a human decision?
- What is the central criticism of environmentally determinist accounts such as _Guns, Germs, and Steel_?