"Until very recently, we had no detailed record of climate changes during the Holocene. Now we do, and
Brian Fagan shows us how climate functioned as what historian Paul Kennedy described as one of the "deeper
transformations" of history - a more important factor than we have heretofore understood." "In The
Long Summer, Fagan shows how a thousand-year chill caused by the sudden shutting off of the Gulf Stream led people
in the Near East to abandon hunting and gathering to take up the cultivation of plant foods; how the catastrophic
flood that created the Black Sea drove settlers deep into Europe; how a subsequent warming and drying of the Sahara
forced its cattle-herding peoples to take up a less hazardous life along the banks of the Nile; how the Roman Empire
extended north in Gaul only as far - and for as long - as the climate allowed sustained cereal farming; and how
a period of increased rainfall in East Africa in the sixth century spread rat populations and the bubonic plague
throughout the Mediterranean, and how this in turn spurred massive migrations that helped shape modern Europe and
the Middle East." The Long Summer illuminates for the first time the centuries-long pattern of human adaptation
to the demands and challenges of an ever-changing climate - demands and challenges that are still with us today.
Table of Contents
Preface xi
Author's Note xvii
1 The Threshold of Vulnerability 1
Part I Pumps and Conveyor Belts
2 The Late Ice Age Orchestra, 18,000 to 13,500 B.C. 13
3 The Virgin Continent, 15,000 to 11,000 B.C. 35
4 Europe During the Great Warming, 15,000 to 11,000 B.C. 59
5 The Thousand-Year Drought, 11,000 to 10,000 B.C. 79
Part II The Centuries of Summer
6 The Cataclysm, 10,000 to 4000 B.C. 99
7 Droughts and Cities, 6200 to 1900 B.C. 127
8 Gifts of the Desert, 6000 to 3100 B.C. 147
Part III The Distance Between Good and Bad Fortune
9 The Dance of Air and Ocean, 2200 to 1200 B.C. 169
10 Celts and Romans, 1200 B.C. to A.D. 900 189
11 The Great Droughts, A.D. 1 to 1200 213
12 Magnificent Ruins, A.D. 1 to 1200 229
Epilogue: A.D. 1200 to Modern Times 247
Notes 253
Acknowledgments 271
Index 273
