The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization

  • Brian Fagan
Granta/Basic Books: 2004. 284pp. £20/$26 0465022812, 1862076448 | ISBN: 0-465-02281-2
Credit: CHRISTIAN DARKIN

Archaeology has numerous goals, which include constructing histories of peoples' cultures through space and time, offering an appreciation of the achievements of past civilizations, and providing historical contexts, both cultural and ecological, for modern events and processes. Writing about such issues for the public can be a challenge, but Brian Fagan is one of the world's most accomplished and prolific popularizers of this complex discipline. As he has shown in a variety of books, he has the knack of making arcane archaeological information accessible to broad audiences. Coupled with his broad knowledge of world prehistory, this skill allows him to show how the distant past is relevant to current concerns.

One of the most pressing concerns today is global climate change. In The Long Summer, Fagan provides an enlightening context for this key modern problem through a clear-headed discussion of the past 15,000 years of climatic warming, which has been enriched by great advances in climatology. He goes on to show how this climatic trend has influenced, but not determined, the development of complex civilizations.

Fagan states that “human relationships to the natural environment and short-term climatic change have always been in flux”, and that we have become increasingly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, thanks to population growth, urbanization and the global spread of industry. He argues that our attempts “to cushion ourselves against smaller, frequent climate stresses...have consistently made us more vulnerable to rarer but larger catastrophes”. This argument leads him to conclude that: “the present problem of global warming is neither proof of late capitalism's intent to commit industrial-strength sins against Mother Earth nor a hallucination imposed on the world by anti-business activists. It is simply a reflection of the scale of our vulnerability, the scale on which we must now think and act.”

The environmental climate trajectory that Fagan describes is not a simple one; it has numerous short and long perturbations. The number of places, environmental events and cultures discussed can be daunting and occasionally confusing, and the complex story sometimes seems to get the better of even such a skilled storyteller as Fagan. But perseverance pays off, as Fagan manages to draw the diverse pieces into a coherent narrative and keep the reader on track. Moving forwards in time, Fagan examines the development of cultural complexity in selected time periods from 15,000 years ago to the present day, and in different regions of the globe from the Near East to the Andes.

Fagan offers many examples of how changes in climate have influenced cultures from hunters and gatherers to complex civilizations. One of the common factors is that environmental shifts in one region of the world can have profound effects in distant regions of the globe. For instance, the collapse of the Laurentide glacier in northern Canada around 6200 BC had profound affects in the eastern Mediterranean and Anatolia, even triggering a drought lasting four centuries, which in turn had a major cultural impact on Anatolia.

Fagan also offers gripping examples of the key role of climatic change in such diverse topics as the rise of settled villages in the Near East some 11,000 years ago, the early growth of cities in ancient Sumer and Egypt in the fourth millennium BC, and the fall of the Roman Empire by the end of the fifth century AD.

Experts in different areas may take issue with Fagan over the details of the changes in the regions that they know best. Clearly Fagan has had to paint with a broad brush, but even though scholars might nitpick on the specifics, the overall picture he creates is argued convincingly.

Fagan concludes the book with a brief review of the evidence that recent years have seen accelerated warming. “With the Industrial Revolution, we took a great stride into an era in which we are frighteningly exposed to potential cataclysm, enhanced by our own seeming ability to warm the earth and increase the probability of extreme climatic events.” What lesson has he gleaned from his historical review? “Like many civilizations before us, we've simply traded up in scale, accepting vulnerability to the big, rare disaster in exchange for a better ability to handle the smaller, more common stresses such as short-term droughts and exceptionally rainy years.” He worries that, terrible as the death tolls have been in recent years from famines and natural disasters, the potential demographic tragedies from the inevitable climatic swings of the future could be simply horrific — especially as governments around the world do not seem to be paying enough attention to this probability.

Whether or not one agrees with Fagan's conclusions, his arguments are clearly drawn and deserve careful scrutiny. The Long Summer is a compelling and fascinating book that should interest a broad scholarly audience and general readers alike.