Customer Reviews

People of the Earth: An Introduction to World Prehistory (12th Edition)

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I, too, read this book in college. I was checking Amazon to find information about the current Edition - I read the other two reviews and felt compelled to write the following review based on the edition I own (7th Ed., 1992).

This book is an excellent survey of the origins of humans and human society/culture from an anthropological perspective, i.e. theories and interpretations based on the material record. The 7th edition is divided into six sections, the first three of which include an introduction to studying prehistory, the earliest humans, and a regional preview of the earliest finds. Section 4 is devoted entirely to the development of agriculture around the world. The current edition may be organized differently, of course...my point is that this is a book about 'Prehistory', the archaeological record, and theories of the formations of human societies and settlements (as opposed to classical history/western civ). After four of the six sections, you've read 14 chapters and some 400 pages and you're just getting to the earliest known cities, circa 8,000 BCE. Fagan necessarily devotes a lot of space to the evidence and possibilities of agriculture, but there is much more here: diagrams of sites, explanations of the artifacts and technologies, other evidence (e.g. pollen found in deep sea cores, paleo-climatology, etc), great maps, timelines and photos, interpretations and speculations to make you ponder.

The material can be dense and the writing style may be too 'old-world academic' for some tastes, but the book contains a wealth of information and the average college reader won't require a dictionary on every other page to get through it. A rewarding, if sometimes challenging read.

"People of the Earth" is not the first of Fagan's books I have read; I studied "Clash of Cultures" for another purpose, although it allowed me to learn the author's style. Fagan is often perceived as "wordy" by most students, but I refuse to carry such a pernicious, pejorative burden in my critical rhetoric. I must acknowledge that here, as in "Clash of Cultures," it seems he devoted more time than necessary to certain subjects, perhaps revealing a certain degree of bias. I posit that he is not biased as much as he is esoteric.

"People of the Earth" is a worthy, detailed introduction to world prehistory, mentioning more detail than many university courses will synthesize. The prose in this text is occasionally challenging but ultimately enthralling if held to closer inspection. Oddities therein may appear in certain instances, but to delineate them would be to disregard scope and argue from semantic analysis alone. This text is not perfect, but no text is ever perfect. Still, it is an excellently accessible textbook given the breadth of information it must provide.

I read this book for a college Archeology course I was taking. I have always been facinated by the subject so I was excited for the class and I couldn't wait to get at the textbook. To my great disappointment, this is probably the worst text I have ever encountered.
The auther takes three pages to say what could be summerized in a few paragraphs. His intent in writings seems to be more along the lines of trying to impress the reader with his intelligence rather than trying to give good information.
What frustraited me most was the KINDS of information he gave on different cultures. He litterally spent over half the book talking about the migration habits of the various forms of prehistoic man around the world; and then litterally only THREE PAGES covering ALL of Greek and Roman history.
He emphasized farming and animal husbandry habits of the different cultures to almost the complete exclusion of topics like government, building construction, city planning, social structure, art, etc. He would take a people, like the Egyptians, and spend pages and pages telling you exactly what kind of crops they grew, how the Nile helped them grow those crops, and what kind of animals they probably kept. Period. With all we know about their culture, this author chose to sum up the thousands of years of Egyptian history in 13 pages, telling the reader only about theories on their early migration and thier farming strategies. I felt I knew more about half the cultures covered in this text just by watching the odd special on the Discovery Channel.