Climate change, society, and pandemic disease in Roman Italy between 200 BCE and 600 CE

Records of past societies confronted with natural climate change can illuminate social responses to environmental stress and environment-disease connections, especially when locally constrained high-temporal resolution paleoclimate reconstructions are available. We present a temperature and precipitation reconstruction for similar to 200 BCE to similar to 600 CE, from a southern Italian marine sedimentary archive-the first high-resolution (similar to 3 years) climate record from the heartland of the Roman Empire, stretching from the so-called Roman Climate Optimum to the Late Antique Little Ice Age. We document phases of instability and cooling from similar to 100 CE onward but more notably after similar to 130 CE. Pronounced cold phases between similar to 160 to 180 CE, similar to 245 to 275 CE, and after similar to 530 CE associate with pandemic disease, suggesting that climate stress interacted with social and biological variables. The importance of environment-disease dynamics in past civilizations underscores the need to incorporate health in risk assessments of climate change.