Customer Reviews

Before California: An Archaeologist Looks at our Earliest Inhabiatants

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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.

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?!

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!

Ok- I am not a vindictive type. I have made all kinds of bad book purchases and waded through awful writing. But when I read the other amazon reviews for this book, I decided to spend (waste?) some time and warn people who actually like cohesive well-formed sentences and solid research that this book will INFURIATE you nearly every time you pick it up. This book is basically unedited. There are paragraphs that are incomprehensible. There is so much repetition in basic points he is trying to make that overall you could get more soild infomation from a 2 hour PBS show on the same topic. It is convoluted, and has the nerve to accuse the subject matter of being guilty of being unwieldy. It is a subject of great interest to me, which makes the book intolerable. I wish I could find something to praise in this work, but I find it grossly irresponsible for an author, with the endorsement of an organization, to publish a book in this condition. Preview the book before you buy. If you like to dive into a subject, then check out the first 30 pages of loopy logic, apologies, and unbearable self-references and personal anecdotes. This is no John McPhee.