Archaeological dialogues has always been dedicated to finding novel ways to stimulate discussion. With issue 19(1), we introduce a new space in the journal designed to further this quest to promote productive debate: in addition to our signature discussion articles, interviews, review articles and notes, a new section called ‘Reactions’ is being added. This is intended to offer a venue for readers who wish to engage thoughtfully with pieces published previously in the journal. When a contributed article is chosen as a discussion piece, the editorial committee invites a panel of scholars to offer comments that are published with the main article and an author's reply. However, we recognize that there are always scholars beyond the selected group of commentators who have significant things to add to the conversation. Now a designated space for continuing the dialogue has been opened, and our readers are invited to take up the challenge.

An interview with Evžen Neustupný opens up a range of issues regarding the theory and history of archaeology and its development in Central Europe. His view of the discipline differs in many ways from that of current global trends. His ‘artefact archaeology’ inverts the concept of adaptation and highlights the role of artefacts in the creation of the human world. The interview also shows that post-war archaeology even to the east of the Iron Curtain followed the trajectory from culture-history paradigm to processualism and onwards. It also testifies to the situation in the social sciences under the Communist regime and the ambiguous role of Marxist philosophy.

This article asks whether there is a role for weather in archaeological narratives. In archaeology, ideas of weather have been expressed almost solely through the aggregated measure of climate. A number of theoretical and practical problems arise from this, specifically in questioning how climatic change can be related to social change. The article reviews how other disciplines have developed a sense of climate that is more embedded in the human experience of landscape. A case study of a township in Cumbria uses the inhabited perspectives of two 18th-century diarists to explore how we might develop and apply these ideas in an archaeological context. The conclusion outlines some of the challenges for future research, arguing that we should consider weather as a material condition of the landscape – something as much open to archaeological investigation as any other aspect of the past.

The central proposition of Toby Pillatt is that in developing an understanding of past human affairs weather is as important as, or more so than, climate. Climate may be simply defined as average weather, whilst weather is the day-to-day occurrence of atmospheric phenomena which impact in perceptible ways on people's lives. The general proposition is sound enough; the challenges come in implementing these ideas in ways which advance our understanding of past people–environment relationships.

Pillatt's research provides exactly the type of critique needed to stimulate debate surrounding the role of archaeology and history in climate studies. The perceptive micro-scale deconstruction of weather, landscape and people in early modern Mosser highlights the precarious disjuncture between the human experience of weather and the processes of climate variability. However, I am certainly a lot more optimistic and positive about the role that archaeology and history have to play in this debate and will perhaps provide a more macro-scale contribution to this particular archaeological dialogue. I would argue that the time-depth of human experience will always be essential in offering context and understanding to individual weather events and longer-term climate variability.

As a palaeo-ecologist, working with historians has made me look critically at the strengths and limitations of my discipline. Resisting the temptation to defer to documents that, however partial or biased, remain far closer to human experience of the land than any pollen sequence, is essential (see Davies and Watson 2007; Hamilton et al. 2009). Richard Tipping (2004) recognized this lure when he distinguished two philosophical approaches to interpreting historic landscape change. These are my starting point for offering an environmental archaeologist's response to the archaeological and interdisciplinary challenges discussed by Toby Pillatt. First, Tipping defined a ‘confirmatory’ approach, in which palaeo-ecologists have sought correlations with written records, but only to confirm documented events, not to challenge them. In this, they have usually relied on selective readings and secondary, often generalized, historical sources. Reading this paper, it is evident that this is not only a one-way process, as those discussing human experience of the environment have been led by models and issues from the environmental sciences, including contemporary concerns. Indeed, a reader of Dawson's (2009) history of Scotland's weather and climate may be forgiven for thinking that all weather was bad weather, with possibly unfavourable expectations for human experience.

Toby Pillatt is right. Weather is important. Weather is important every day, as is evident from almost every news broadcast we watch or hear. This is not only true for extreme weather situations – which currently abound in the news – but for ordinary weather conditions at any time. The importance is quite clearly reflected in the numerous weather channels and weather websites and the weather forecast at the end of every news programme. Despite the ‘benefits of civilization’ which today make us often independent of outside influences, many simple daily decisions are still based on the current weather situation. Weather is our first and most immediate environmental experience. It was no different in the past. On the contrary, weather-based decisions were much more important historically than at present, both for individuals and for entire societies. No doubt, then, weather should be of concern also for historical studies. Hence Toby Pillat is right. He is also correct in stating that by involving a palaeo-weather perspective we can add much to our understanding about how past societies operated.

Although it is easy to agree with Toby Pillatt that the role of weather in the archaeological record has been understated, it is more difficult to provide a clear method for incorporating the weather into archaeological interpretation. His concerns about the dominance of climate in interpretations are also acknowledged. Whereas climate and weather are indeed important to the interpretation of past ways of life, when we do try to recognize a direct correlation between, for example, a climate proxy record and any specific human behaviour, it is common to discover that any neighbouring proxy record will show a different set of relationships. Although there is a long history critiquing this approach, there is still a tendency for the uncritical to draw simplistic conclusions.

The aim of my article is to stimulate debate about the roles weather and climate might play in archaeological interpretations. It is, therefore, encouraging that the respondents have sought to develop and build upon the theoretical themes highlighted. Respondents have tended to agree with me that weather is and was an integral part of people's lives, and also that this is a subject worthy of archaeological research. This was by no means a certainty when we are considering something so ephemeral as weather in a discipline often held in thrall by the imprecisions of chronologies, and which has a penchant for the broad scale and the long term. Of course, these concerns do partly remain, yet the importance of weather, both as the lived experience of climate and as a medium through which people live their daily lives, is not questioned. As Wilkinson points out, the record of Michael the Syrian illuminates the many and varied environmental trials faced by past people, but Davies's anecdote concerning her perception of the Highland landscape warns against assuming that all people recognized and responded to similar weather (or climate) events in similar ways. This suggests that there is value in exploring a weather-based perspective. The question is, how do we get at the human experience of climate in the deeper past, when chronological resolution is coarser and where the lack of written records restricts access to people's perceptions?

This is a response to Rachel Pope's paper on processual archaeology and gender politics. As a female archaeologist in England I have experienced much of what she describes: I was educated in England in the 1950s and 1960s, I have been a lecturer in Cambridge since 1977, and I was present at the 2006 Personal Histories event in Cambridge which sparked Rachel's thoughts. But my own experience has been different to Rachel's in many ways. I belong to a different generation and have had a different life: but I think it is important to recognize how context-determined all accounts of the past are, and how difficult it is to avoid oversimplification and bias. It is easy to use the evidence which supports an argument, and discard what does not, from which a very different picture might be created – as indeed Rachel is arguing, in parts of her paper. If we cannot achieve that for living memory then how can we approach the real complexity of life in the distant past? So this is my alternative take on some of these themes, as another, contrasting, version of events.