The role of seasonality is indisputable in climate and ecosystem dynamics. Seasonal temperature and precipitation variability are of vital importance for the availability of food, water, shelter, migration routes, and raw materials. Thus, understanding past climatic and environmental changes at seasonal scale is equally important for unearthing the history and for predicting the future of human societies under global warming scenarios. Alas, in palaeoenvironmental research, the term ‘seasonality change’ is often used liberally without scrutiny or explanation as to which seasonal parameter has changed and how.

Here we provide fundamentals of climate seasonality and break it down into external (insolation changes) and internal (atmospheric CO₂ concentration) forcing, and regional and local and modulating factors (continentality, altitude, large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns). Further, we present a brief overview of the archives with potentially annual/seasonal resolution (historical and instrumental records, marine invertebrate growth increments, stalagmites, tree rings, lake sediments, permafrost, cave ice, and ice cores) and discuss archive-specific challenges and opportunities, and how these limit or foster the use of specific archives in archaeological research.

Next, we address the need for adequate data-quality checks, involving both archive-specific nature (e.g., limited sampling resolution or seasonal sampling bias) and analytical uncertainties. To this end, we present a broad spectrum of carefully selected statistical methods which can be applied to analyze annually- and seasonally-resolved time series. We close the manuscript by proposing a framework for transparent communication of seasonality-related research across different communities.

季节性在气候和生态系统动态中的作用是无可争辩的。季节性温度和降水变化对于食物、水、住所、迁徙路线和原材料的供应至关重要。因此，了解过去季节尺度的气候和环境变化对于发掘历史和预测全球变暖情景下人类社会的未来同样重要。唉，在古环境研究中，“季节性变化”一词经常被随意使用，没有仔细审查或解释哪些季节性参数发生了变化以及如何变化。

在这里，我们提供了气候季节性的基础知识，并将其分解为外部（日照变化）和内部（大气 CO ₂浓度）强迫，以及区域和局部和调节因素（大陆性、海拔高度、大尺度大气环流模式）。此外，我们简要概述了具有潜在年度/季节性分辨率的档案（历史和仪器记录、海洋无脊椎动物生长增量、石笋、树木年轮、湖泊沉积物、永久冻土、洞穴冰和冰芯），并讨论了档案特定的挑战和机会，以及这些如何限制或促进特定档案在考古研究中的使用。

接下来，我们需要进行充分的数据质量检查，包括档案特定的性质（例如，有限的采样分辨率或季节性采样偏差）和分析的不确定性。为此，我们提出了广泛的精心挑选的统计方法，可用于分析年度和季节性解析的时间序列。我们通过提出一个跨不同社区透明地交流季节性相关研究的框架来结束手稿。