Knowing the Black Box: Methodological Challenges in Marine Environmental History

Marine environmental historians face a series of epistemological challenges when they attempt to historicize the oceans in periods before systematic scientific records. A review of recent work reveals methodological problems that must be addressed as historians move forward, and that encourage historians to make their case more forcefully to marine biologists and historical ecologists that the study of the past requires a disciplined approach to evidence and its contexts. This has at times been sorely missing.