Before California: An Archaeologist Looks at our Earliest Inhabiatants [Hardcover]

Brian Fagan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 18, 2003

As the tour guide for this fascinating trip across the Golden State, the author will take uou to visit distinct societies in widely constrasting environments : Chumash villages on the Santa Barbara coast, shell mounds in the San Francisco Bay, salmon trappers of the northern streams, acorn gatherers of the Central Valley, and shamans who painted a multitude of mysterious figures on stone.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Famed archaeologist Brian Fagan has produced a captivating and readable account of the first 12,000 years of California history....Students of California history will find Before California a welcome addition to the history of the Golden State. (American Archaeology )

In his fascinating, even topical new look at the archaeology of California, UC Santa Barbara anthropology professor Brian Fagan gets on our good side from the outset. He knows that most general readers will probably approach his book out of interest in California, rather than in archaeology. Wisely then, Before California takes early and frequent pains to reassure us that Fagan has far more than potsherds and milling stones on his mind. Right from the beginning, the tone is smart and layman-friendly, with parallels to modern California neither forced nor ignored. (San Francisco Chronicle )

This sweeping history of early California, which covers almost 13,000 years of settlement and colonisation, is written with the widest possible readership in mind and, as such, it avoids jargon and more specialized fields...The result is an intelligent and well-presented archaeological assesment of the evidence for California's environment and peoples through the millennia. (Oxbow Book News, No. 57, Autumn 2003 )

The first comprehensive guide to California archaeology and prehistory designed for a general audience... few authors have undertaken such a monumental book project...for more than a quarter century [Fagan] has been doing the difficult and under-appreciated work of translating often turgid and inaccessible scholarship into highly readable books that recruit undergraduate majors to the discipline in droves and bolster public support for archaeological research and preservation...he brings his readers along as equals, on what is clearly his own voyage of discovery...Before California is a welcome addition to the popular literature on California history and culture. It fills an obvious gap on the shelves of public libraries, bookstores, secondary schools and museum gift shops. (Terri Castaneda H-Net Book Review, Oct. 2003 )

Brian Fagan is one of those rare scholars who has made a determined and successful effort to bring the excitement of archaeology to the public. A widely respected archaeologist and author of some 30 books, he provides us, in Before California, with a tour of the Golden State long before the decimation of its native peoples began in the 18th and 19th centuries. Combining his far-reaching knowledge of archaeology with a unique ability to synthesize information from diverse fields, Fagan presesnts an informative rendering of California's past...Before California is crammed with fascinating archaeological details, but rather than simply recounting 'the facts,' Fagan successfully intertwines [the] main threads that serve to organize this wide-ranging foray onto California's past. (Donald Johanson Los Angeles Times, Sunday, Nov. 23, 2003 )

Using artifacts, anthropological studies and tree-ringing sequences, archaeologist Brian Fagan explains the changing gender roles, climactic shifts and trading patterns that shaped the lives of the Golden State's first inhabitants. (Archaeology Odyssey, Jan/Feb 2004 )

In his most recent book, Before California, Brian Fagan offers an entertaining synopsis of California's archaeology that highlights creative human adaptation to an ever-changing environment...[Fagan is] well qualified to write the first book-length synopsis of California archaeology in almost twenty years. Thus, Before California fills a lacuna in the literature, and Fagan's entertaining style will appeal to many...he enjoys telling stories and he does it well...Before California binds together an interesting array of facts with narratives that emphasise 'the flexible ingenuity' by which ancient Californians adapted to 'harsh, never predictable environments.' To scholars, it offers an up-to-date synopsis of California's archaeology in a single package...appropriate for modern Californians interested in a readable synopsis of their state's archaeology. (Professor Walter J. Bowyer Rock Art Research, Vol. 20, No. 2, 2003 )

In this highly readable and enlightening book, archaeologist Brian Fagan bridges the gulf that separates today's Californian's from their predecessors....Anyone who wants to understand California needs to read this book. Fagan is an eminent scholar, and he did not sacrifice scientific knowledge for the sake of readability. Instead, he has asked big questions, then cut through the arcane to tell us, broadly, what is known, what can be surmised, and what is still being debated. It's all woven into a story that makes history come alive. (RG California Coast and Ocean )

This is a detailed, very solid, overview of California Arcaeology, with scads of illustration and all of the bells and whistles of scholarship--ends-notes, bibliography, index. (The California Territorial Quarterly )

Fagan explains dramatic changes in regional culures and populations while also recognizing their continuity and intensive interaction...Authoritative and written in a narrative style, the book is often enhanced with vivid scenarios based on material evidence and reasonable speculation...Highly recommended. (K.A. Dixon (emeritus) Choice Reviews Online )

About the Author

Brian Fagan is the best-known popular writer on archaeology in the United States, author of two dozen books and several leading textbooks in archaeology. He is professor of anthropology at University of California, Santa Barbara. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Altamira Press (March 18, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0742527948
• ISBN-13: 978-0742527942
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,291,196 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Brian Fagan was born in England and studied archaeology at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He was Keeper of Prehistory at the Livingstone Museum, Zambia, from 1959-1965. During six years in Zambia and one in East Africa, he was deeply involved in fieldwork on multidisciplinary African history and in monuments conservation. He came to the United States in 1966 and was Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, from 1967 to 2004, when he became Emeritus.
Since coming to Santa Barbara, Brian has specialized in communicating archaeology to general audiences through lecturing, writing, and other media. He is regarded as one of the world's leading archaeological and historical writers and is widely respected popular lecturer about the past. His many books include three volumes for the National Geographic Society, including the bestselling Adventure of Archaeology. Other works include The Rape of the Nile, a classic history of archaeologists and tourists along the Nile, and four books on ancient climate change and human societies, Floods, Famines, and Emperors (on El Niños), The Little Ice Age, and The Long Summer, an account of warming and humanity since the Great Ice Age. His most recent climatic work describes the Medieval Warm Period: The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations. His other books include Chaco Canyon: Archaeologists Explore the Lives of an Ancient Society and Fish on Friday: Feasting, Fasting, and the Discovery of the New World and Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age gave birth to the First Modern Humans. His recently published Elixir: A History of Water and Humankind extends his climatic research to the most vital of all resources for humanity.
Brian has been sailing since he was eight years old and learnt his cruising in the English Channel and North Sea. He has sailed thousands of miles in European waters, across the Atlantic, and in the Pacific. He is author of the Cruising Guide to Central and Southern California, which has been a widely used set of sailing directions since 1979. An ardent bicyclist, he lives in Santa Barbara with his life Lesley and daughter Ana.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Archaeology well-told and made fascinating, June 2, 2004

By 

Dennis Littrell (SoCal) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Before California: An Archaeologist Looks at our Earliest Inhabiatants (Hardcover)

What Brian Fagan, who is a world-renown authority on archaeology and Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, does that I like very much is imagine what everyday life was like among the first human inhabitants of California and describe that life.

Typically he opens a chapter with a scene from the past. For example he imagines the early Californians hunting a bear by using smoke to disorient the animal and to force it out of its cave and spears and arrows to kill it. Or he shows how the acorns, which came to be the main source of sustenance for the natives, are harvested by shaking the trees. Or how dolphins were hunted at Eel Point on San Clemente Island. In this imagination Fagan uses material from anthropologists elsewhere in the world including Judy Porcasi's observations of modern-day shallow water dolphin hunting in Polynesia. This "reconstruction" of what must have happened (or something very similar) is a technique that Fagan returns to again and again to help the reader visualize a way of life not recorded and only sparsely evidenced. Indeed this is the job of the archaeologist: to make the dim past come alive so that we may get a better idea of who we are and from whence we came.

Some highlights: Fagan does not believe that the first settlers who came from Siberia came in canoes and other sea craft along the shoreline. He sees instead a migration across the Bering Land Bridge through present day Alaska and Canada between the Cordileran Ice Sheet to the west and the Laurentide Ice Sheet to the east and into what is now the northern and midwestern United States, and from there into California. And after that in reverse order up the coast. In other words southern and central California had human settlers before northern coastal California.

Of course California is a vast land with a multitude of microclimates and natural communities. In the great basins for thousands of years the natives subsisted on grains shaken from their stalks at exactly the right time of the year, and then ground on milling stones into flour, while along the coast the bulk of calories came from the taking of sea mammals, fish, clams, mussels and other shoreline creatures. But Fagan also shows us how the climate changed over the millennia and how the dwindling stocks of animals, such as the easy-to-kill seals, forced the inhabitants to find other sources of sustenance. The greatest change came about when humans learned to leach the tannins from acorns and thereby free up a rich source of fat, protein and carbohydrates for consumption. Fagan explains how the acorns were harvested, how they were stored in thatched granaries away from rodents ("with pungent, minty wormwood to repel insects and worms"); how they were shelled and pounded with pestle and mortar into flour, and how they were leached by flushing water repeatedly through the meal, and finally made into breads, soups and gruels.

What is fascinating about all this is the time scale and comparisons we might make with what was happening elsewhere in the world. Independently the people of the eastern Mediterranean world some few thousand years prior had learned to process and consume acorns as a diet staple. Here we see a people discover a not-at-all-obvious process from necessity and without cultural guidance.

Fagan also shows how, as the climate warmed and the humans learned how to better use the resources of the land, populations increased, and how the peoples learned to trade and to compete with one another. He shows how the population grew from sparsely scattered bands to "tribelets" and into tribes and how that changed the way people lived. This a story that begins before 11,200 B.C.--a time when agriculture and animal husbandry was just beginning in the Middle East and the ice age had barely begun its retreat--until the time of European contact and into the modern age. It is a tale of human ingenuity in a sometimes very harsh land, and of human adaptation to vast climate and environmental changes. It is of necessity a largely incomplete story, pieced together from the usual artifacts of archaeology--hieroglyphs and stone tools, animal bones and hunting arrows, milling stones and obsidian knives, etc., amended with insights from elsewhere in the world, and fleshed out with the imagination of a great archaeologist.

Fagan even gives us a glimpse of California 18,000 years ago when there were no human settlements ("No wisps of camp fire smoke rise from lake- or riverside encampments") and "herds of large Ice Age species like the long-haired mammoth...wild horses, and several forms of camels" still roamed the land. It is a pristine world that I have often dreamed about with cave bears and saber-tooth tigers and vast herds of bison and ferocious grizzly bears. Fagan imagines how this land appeared to the first settlers and how they went about making it their home and how they evolved with the land as it changed over the millennia. It is a great story and one that Fagan tells very well.

4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book!, March 14, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Before California: An Archaeologist Looks at our Earliest Inhabiatants (Hardcover)

Excellent book...well researched and written in Brian Fagan's usual readable yet scholarly style. I worked on the Skyrocket site back in the early 1990's and it was very nice to read about the work that was done there. The other sites mentioned are interesting as well, and his conclusions are based on sound evidence. I can highly recommend the book for archeologists...and the rest of us too.

I checked the book out of the library, but I am going to have to buy it...how often does one's backside get to be in a book?!

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars quality, August 31, 2011

By 

Serena "Serena LEE" (Sacramento, CA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Before California: An Archaeologist Looks at our Earliest Inhabiatants (Hardcover)

When I first looked at the book it looked completely fine until I opened it. I read it to page ten then the first ten pages fell out. The binding of the book is horrible. I can predict that soon the rest of the book will fall out. No wonder it was so cheap!