A multidisciplinary research consortium is being funded by the European Union under the title “Millennium” to investigate European climate change and to establish whether recent (20th century) climate trends were exceptional within the context of the last 1,000 years. We present the first results of the project. Millennium is grounded in the rationale that a multi-proxy approach represents one of the most powerful methods to improve our understanding of past climate variability. This session welcomes posters and papers covering Millennium’s core research themes: documentary and historical climate records, tree ring proxy data, sedimentary archives (peat, ice, lake sediments), marine proxies and data analysis innovations (new methods, climate modelling and proxy-model comparisons). We are particularly interested in studies involving proxy data-climate model inter-comparisons. We encourage submissions both from within the consortium and from the wider community working on late Holocene palaeoclimate around the world