Brian Fagan obituary

The Guardian

4 days ago

Science is continuously revealing astonishing insights into ourselves and our world. Transmitting those advances to a wider public, while reminding specialists whom they really work for, is a rare craft. For the past half century, Brian Fagan, who has died aged 88, did that through his writing and speaking, shaping public understanding of ancient human history.
Unlike Carl Sagan or David Attenborough, who brought cosmology and nature into millions of homes, Brian never fronted a television series. But his well-researched output was prodigious: including revised editions, he wrote or edited the equivalent of two books for every year of his life.
Nine textbooks covering world prehistory and the practice of archaeology have been through a total of 83 revisions, most in recent years co-authored with the British editor and archaeologist Nadia Durrani.
Books for a wider readership range in subject from human origins and the early Americas to the search for Tutankhamun. His first, The Rape of the Nile: Tomb Robbers, Tourists, and Archaeologists in Egypt (1975), won a California book award gold medal. The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations (2008) was his New York Times bestseller, and Climate Chaos: Lessons on Survival from Our Ancestors (2021, with Durrani) won Italy's Cosmos award for popular science writing.
It is an immense challenge to bring the ancient past to proper life, informed by no more than broken remains and highly technical science. Brian's approach was to focus on the human and the global, throwing in contemporary references – notably in a number of books that dealt with climate change and rising sea levels – and fictional vignettes.
A millennia ago in California, 'Flickering hearths and blazing firebrands highlight dark windows and doorways on the terrace of the great house that is Pueblo Bonito.' Describing two stoneworkers in 7000BC Belgium 'camped in a sandy clearing', he noted that one of them was left-handed, before explaining how that observation was obtained. His first rule of writing: 'Always tell a story.'
Like Sagan, Brian was a university professor with his own research experiences. Born in Birmingham, he was adopted at birth by Margaret (nee Moir) and Brian Fagan. His father was a president of the Publishers' Association who worked in partnership with Edward Arnold, founder of Edward Arnold & Co, where he was responsible for school books and the university arts list. His grandfather, Patrick Fagan, was a fellow of the Royal Asiatic, Royal Astronomical and Royal Historical Societies. Brian was himself an honorary fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London. He was later to learn that his birth mother was a teacher.
Like his father, he went to Rugby school. He did national service with the Royal Navy, before studying archaeology and anthropology at Pembroke College, Cambridge (1956–59).
He then completed his Cambridge MA and PhD in Africa (1959-65), principally when keeper of prehistory at the Livingstone Museum, Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia), and conducting archaeological fieldwork in that country and Kenya. In 1960 he had a short stint lecturing at the University of Cape Town, South Africa (he returned there as a visiting professor in 1982).
He decided early on that his forte lay in teaching and popular writing, not primary research; he left Africa, he said, exhausted by the logistics of excavation and survey, and as 'a sound, but second-rate excavator'.
He had thought of joining the family publishing business. When offered a visiting position at the University of Illinois, Urbana, however, he happened to lunch with Mortimer Wheeler, then a powerful archaeologist and media star. Wheeler advised him to write about archaeology for the public, saying, 'We need a new voice.' Brian spent a year at Urbana before moving to the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB).
Newly faced in 1967 with a class of 300 introductory anthropology students, and no books to support his teaching, he set about filling the gap. Within seven years he had published two introductory readers, and two textbooks: In the Beginning: An Introduction to Archaeology (of which a 15th edition was published this year), and Men of the Earth: An Introduction to World Prehistory (currently, as People of the Earth, in its 16th edition).
Told he could teach 'anything I liked', it was nonetheless a difficult time. Two influential and charismatic archaeologists, Lewis Binford and James Deetz, had left the department just as he arrived. That year, Ronald Reagan had begun his first term as governor of California, on a mission to stamp out campus protest (UCSB was notorious for its anti-Vietnam war activity, and in 1969 a caretaker was killed by a bomb), cut university spending, and bend curriculums towards conservative thinking. The anthropology department, Brian said, was 'reeling from the impact'.
Nevertheless, unperturbed, and gifted with confidence, drive and vision, Brian stayed at UCSB, writing one book after another. He retired in 2003 as professor emeritus of anthropology.
The Archaeological Institute of America recognised his books with a lifetime achievement award, and the Society for American Archaeology awarded him three times, for his public writing and media work, and his book Before California (2003).
Beside books and teaching (in which he was an early adopter of new technologies, encouraging his students to think freely), Brian busied himself widely as university dean (various posts 1970–76), consultant (for the likes of the National Geographic Society, Time/Life, Microsoft and the BBC), magazine columnist and editorial adviser. He would have liked to have presented TV films, he once told me (though he claimed not to watch any), but that call never came. He was an impressive and charismatic speaker, however, in more recent years teasing his audiences with humour, and with the presence of an ageing Shakespearean actor who was fit enough to bicycle 100 miles a week into his 80s.
Occasions ranged from Munro lecturer at the University of Edinburgh (1967), through to guest speaker at Flinders University Museum of Art (2014) – and many more. Other awards included recognition for his teaching, and the Cruising Association's Hanson Cup (he once crossed the Atlantic in his own boat). As a keen sailor he enjoyed California's coastal waters (and, naturally, published well-received cruising guides). He was working on new book editions, and a new title, when he died.
His first marriage, to Judith Fontana, ended in divorce. He married Lesley Newhart in 1985, and she survives him, as do their daughter, Anastasia, and his daughter with Judith, Lindsay.
Brian Murray Fagan, archaeologist and writer, born 1 August 1936; died 1 July 2025