The Long Summer

by Fagan, Brian M.

• ISBN13: 9780465022816
• ISBN10: 0465022812
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-01-01
• Publisher: Basic Books

Summary

For more than a century we've known that much of human evolution occurred in an Ice Age. Starting about 15,000 years ago, temperatures began to rise, the glaciers receded, and sea levels rose. The rise of human civilization and all of recorded history occurred in this warm period, known as the Holocene.Until very recently we had no detailed record of climate changes during the Holocene. Now we do. In this engrossing and captivating look at the human effects of climate variability, Brian Fagan shows how climate functioned as what the historian Paul Kennedy described as one of the "deeper transformations" of history--a more important historical factor than we understand.

Author Biography

Brian Fagan is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. xi
Author's Note	p. xvii
The Threshold of Vulnerability	p. 1
Pumps and Conveyor Belts
The Late Ice Age Orchestra, 18,000 to 13,500 B.C.	p. 13
The Virgin Continent, 15,000 to 11,000 B.C.	p. 35
Europe During the Great Warming, 15,000 to 11,000 B.C.	p. 59
The Thousand-Year Drought, 11,000 to 10,000 B.C.	p. 79
The Centuries of Summer
The Cataclysm, 10,000 to 4000 B.C.	p. 99
Droughts and Cities, 6200 to 1900 B.C.	p. 127
Gifts of the Desert, 6000 to 3100 B.C.	p. 147
The Distance Between Good and Bad Fortune
The Dance of Air and Ocean, 2200 to 1200 B.C.	p. 169
Celts and Romans, 1200 B.C. to A.D. 900	p. 189
The Great Droughts, A.D. 1 to 1200	p. 213
Magnificent Ruins, A.D. 1 to 1200	p. 229
Epilogue: A.D. 1200 to Modern Times	p. 247
Notes	p. 253
Acknowledgments	p. 271
Index	p. 273
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