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Brian M. Fagan

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Born: July 31 1936

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Brian Murray Fagan is a prolific author of popular archaeology books and a professor emeritus of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, California, USA. Fagan was born in England where he received his childhood education at Rugby School. He attended Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he studied archaeology and anthropology .

He spent six years as Keeper of Prehistory at the Livingstone Museum in Zambia, Central Africa, and moved to the U.S.A. in 1966. He was Visiting Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, in 1966/67, and was appointed Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1967.

Fagan is an archaeological generalist, with expertise in the broad issues of human prehistory. He is the author or editor of 46 books, including seven widely used undergraduate college texts. Fagan has contributed over 100 specialist papers to many national and international journals. He is a Contributing Editor to American Archaeology and Discover Archaeology magazines, and formerly wrote a regular column for Archaeology Magazine. He serves on the Editorial Boards of six academic and general periodicals and has many popular magazine credits, including Scientific American and Gentleman's Quarterly.

Fagan has been an archaeological consultant for many organizations, including National Geographic Society, Time-Life, Encyclopædia Britannica, and Microsoft Encarta. He has lectured extensively about archaeology and other subjects throughout the world at many venues, including the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, the National Geographic Society, the San Francisco City Lecture Program, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Getty Conservation Institute.

In addition to extensive experience with the development of Public Television programs, Fagan was the developer/writer of Where in time is Carmen San Diego, an NPR series in 1984-86. He has worked as a consultant for the BBC, RKO, and many Hollywood production companies on documentaries. In 1995 he was Senior Series Consultant for Time-Life Television's "Lost Civilizations" series.

Fagan was awarded the 1996 Society of Professional Archaeologists' Distinguished Service Award for his "untiring efforts to bring archaeology in front of the public." He also received a Presidential Citation Award from the Society for American Archaeology in 1996 for his work in textbook, general writing and media activities. He received the Society's first Public Education Award in 1997.

He has written many critiques of contemporary archaeology and has advocated non-traditional approaches, as well as writing extensively on the role of archaeology in contemporary society. His approach is a melding of different theoretical approaches, which focuses on the broad issues of human prehistory and the past. He is a strong advocate of multidisciplinary approaches to such issues as climate change in the past. Over the years, he has written a series of well-known textbooks that provide accurate summaries of the latest advances in archaeological method and theory and world prehistory. These are designed for beginners and avoid both confusing jargon and major theoretical discussion, which is inappropriate at this basic level. His approach melds traditional cultural history with more recent approaches, with a major emphasis on writing historical narrative using archaeological data and sources from other disciplines. Fagan is also well known for his public lectures on a wide variety of archaeological and historical topics, delivered to a broad range of archaeological and non-archaeological audiences.

Additional information at Wikipedia.

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Brian M. Fagan

Brian M. Fagan

Books from Brian M. Fagan

The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850

Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans

The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization

The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations

A Little History of Archaeology

The Rape of the Nile: Tomb Robbers, Tourists, and Archaeologists in Egypt

The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics

Elixir: A History of Water and Humankind

Beyond the Blue Horizon: How the Earliest Mariners Unlocked the Secrets of the Oceans

People of the Earth: An Introduction to World Prehistory

The Seventy Great Mysteries of the Ancient World

Fish on Friday: Feasting, Fasting, and the Discovery of the New World

Secrets of the Universe in 100 Symbols

What We Did in Bed: A Horizontal History

The Complete Ice Age: How Climate Change Shaped the World

World Prehistory: A Brief Introduction

Climate Chaos: Lessons on Survival from Our Ancestors

In the Beginning: An Introduction to Archaeology

Fish on Friday: Feasting, Fasting, and the Discovery of the New World

Fishing: How the Sea Fed Civilization