Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations » (Reprint)

Brian Fagan is an emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Born in England, he did fieldwork in Africa and has written about early man, forensic archaeology, and many other topics. His books on the interaction of climate and human society have established him as a leading authority on the subject; he lectures frequently around the world. He is the editor of The Oxford Companion to Archaeology and the author of Fish on Friday: Feasting, Fasting, and the Discovery of the New World; The Little Ice Age; and The Long Summer, among many other titles.

A breakout bestseller on how the earth’s previous global warming phase reshaped human societies from the Arctic to the Sahara—a wide-ranging history with sobering lessons for our own time.

From the tenth to the fifteenth century the earth experienced a rise in surface temperature that changed climate worldwide—a preview of today’s global warming. In some areas, including western Europe, longer summers brought bountiful harvests and population growth that led to cultural flowering. In the Arctic, Inuit and Norse sailors made cultural connections across thousands of miles as they traded precious iron goods. Polynesian sailors, riding new wind patterns, were able to settle the remotest islands on earth. But in many parts of the world, the warm centuries brought drought and famine. Elaborate societies in western and central America collapsed, and the vast building complexes of Chaco Canyon and the Mayan Yucatán were left empty. The history of the Great Warming of a half millennium ago suggests that 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.”

The New York Times - William Grimes

…[a] fascinating account of shifting climatic conditions and their consequences from about A.D. 800 to 1300, often referred to as the Medieval Warm Period…Mr. Fagan, an anthropologist who has written on climate change in The Long Summer and The Little Ice Age, proceeds methodically, working his way across the globe and reading the evidence provided by tree rings, deep-sea cores, coral samples, computer weather models and satellite photos. The picture that emerges remains blurry…but it has sharpened considerably over the past 40 years, enough for Mr. Fagan to present a coherent account of profound changes in human societies from the American Southwest to the Huang He River basin in China.

Preface ix

Author's Note xix

1 A Time of Warming 1

2 "The Mantle of the Poor" 22

3 The Fail of God 46

4 The Golden Trade of the Moors 66

5 Inuit and Qadlunaat 87

6 The Megadrought Epoch 106

7 Acorns and Pueblos 120

8 Lords of the Water Mountains 138

9 The Lords of Chimor 155

10 Bucking the Trades 173

11 The Flying Fish Ocean 194

12 China's Sorrow 213

13 The Silent Elephant 228

Acknowledgments 243

Notes 245

Index 263