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| How Lou met archaeology (after Jones) |
Brian M. Fagan introduced a lot of people to archaeology, including myself. The first book I remember reading on archaeology, well before getting to Berkeley, was
Quest for the Past, which exposed me to some of archaeology's most famous moments, like
Louis Leakey finding "The Cradle of Mankind" in
Olduvai Gorge,
Howard Carter getting into
Tutankhamun's tomb, and, more locally, Richard Daughtery excavating the amazingly preserved, pre-contact Makah village of
Ozette right here in Washington State. Fagan's
Archaeology: A Brief Introduction, quite possibly the most widely used textbook in introductory archaeology classes, is now in its eleventh edition. Fagan, now approaching his 76th birthday, is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the
University of California, Santa Barbara and is still a very prolific writer. So when G'Ma once again had a book to pass down, I was pleased to see Fagan's name. I hadn't read an archaeology book in a long time, and this was an old friend.
The central topic of
The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise an Fall of Civilizations, is the
Medieval Warm Period, hereafter to be referred to as the MWP. Proposed by the British meteorologist Hubert Lamb, the MWP was a period between roughly AD 800 and 1200 of what we would now call global warming. The MWP was first applied to Medieval Europe, and for those cultures it was a grand time. The general warming meant more settled weather, leading in turn to better farming, population growth, and that legendary time of kings, knights, serfs, and alewives; yes, the MWP was most definitely a factor in the history of beer. Elsewhere, the MWP was downright malicious. This is perhaps what drew G'Ma to this book: It is a set of archaeological cautionary tales of how cultural strategies did and did not successfully respond to drastic climate change. Here are a few of several striking cases, representative of Fagan's approach.
