Books

Books : reviews

Brian M. Fagan, Peter Andrews.
Time Detectives: how scientists use modern technology to unravel the secrets of the past.
Touchstone. 1995

(pp33-64 missing; pp65-96 repeated)

Brian M. Fagan.
The Oxford Companion to Archaeology.
OUP. 1996

Brian M. Fagan.
The Little Ice Age: how climate made history 1300-1850.
Basic Books. 2000

Brian M. Fagan.
Grahame Clark: an intellectual biography of an archaeologist.
Westview. 2001

To chronicle the intellectual life of Grahame Clark (1907–1995) is to participate in the history of the discipline of archaeology, which Clark—almost single-bandedly at first—transformed from an antiquarian pastime based largely on artifact classification into a sophisticated study of the human past based on collaborations among scientists from many disciplines. Noted archaeology writer Brian Fagan, himself a former student of Clark’s at Cambridge University, assesses Clark’s pioneering efforts in economic and environmental prehistory. Out of the stultifying atmosphere of dull museum display cases, Clark redefined prehistoric archaeology as the study of ancient communities ceaselessly adapting to ever-changing environments. His famous excavation of the Stone Age hunter-gatherer site of Star Carr was a tour de force of environmental archaeology. Clark also broke British prehistory out of its entrenched provincialism to consider Britain within the context of Mesolithic Europe and, eventually, global prehistory. During Clark’s exceptionally long career, spanning well over half a century, the generations of students he trained colonized the world of archaeology and reshaped the discipline in Clark’s image.

Brian M. Fagan.
Human Prehistory and the First Civilizations.
Great Courses. 2003

Brian M. Fagan.
The Great Warming: climate change and the rise and fall of civilizations.
Bloomsbury Press. 2008

What a difference a degree makes. From the tenth to the fifteenth century the earth experienced a rise in average temperature that changed climate worldwide—preview of today’s global warming. As acclaimed archaeologist Brian Fagan shows in these pages, subtle shifts in the environment had far-reaching effects on human life.

In western Europe, longer summers brought bountiful harvests and population growth that led to cultural flowering: we may have the Great Warming to thank for the great cathedrals. In the Arctic, Inuit and Norse sailors made cultural connections across thousands of miles, trading precious iron goods. In the Pacific, Polynesian sailors, riding new wind patterns, were able to settle the remotest islands on earth.

But in many parts of the globe, the warm centuries brought drought, famine, and misery. In North and Central America, elaborate societies collapsed, and the vast building complexes of Chaco Canyon and the Mayan Yucatán were left desolate.

As he did in his bestselling The Little Ice Age, Fagan unfolds both a scientific detective story, showing how centuries-old weather patterns can be reconstructed from scattered clues, and a vivid and timely historical narrative. A study of the first Great Warming suggests we may yet be underestimating the power of climate change to disrupt our lives today. And our vulnerability to drought, writes Fagan, is the “silent elephant in the room.”

Chris Scarre, Brian M. Fagan, Charles Golden.
Ancient Civilizations: 5th edn.
Routledge. 2021

Ancient Civilizations offers a comprehensive and straightforward account of the world’s first civilizations and how they were discovered, drawing on many avenues of inquiry including archaeological excavations, surveys, laboratory work, highly specialized scientific investigations, and both historical and ethnohistorical records.

This book covers the earliest civilizations in Eurasia and the Americas, from Egypt and the Sumerians to the Indus Valley, Shang China, and the Maya. It also addresses subsequent developments in Southwest Asia, moving on to the first Aegean civilizations, Greece and Rome, the first states of sub-Saharan Africa, divine kings and empires in East and Southeast Asia, and the Aztec and Inka empires of Mesoamerica and the Andes. It includes a number of features to support student learning: a wealth of images, including several new illustrations; feature boxes which expand on key sites, finds, and written sources; and an extensive guide to further reading. With new perceptions of the origin and collapse of states, including a review of the issue of sustainability, this fifth edition has been extensively updated in the light of spectacular new discoveries and the latest theoretical advances.

Examining the world’s pre-industrial civilizations from a multidisciplinary perspective and offering a comparative analysis of the field which explores the connections between all civilizations around the world, this volume provides a unique introduction to pre-industrial civilizations in all their brilliant diversity. It will prove invaluable to students of Archaeology.