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Book Review: The long summer. How climate changed civilization

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DOI: 10.1177/095968360501500720

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 The Holocene
http://hol.sagepub.com

Book Review: The long summer. How climate changed civilization

Gary O. Rollefson
The Holocene 2005; 15; 1102
DOI: 10.1177/095968360501500720

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1102 The Holocene 15 (2005)
As a compilation of individual papers, this book serves well
as an account of the state-of-the-art in the study of cave
sediments and their value in palaeoenvironmental reconstruc-
tion. Although dominated by case studies with a bias towards
the USA, it contains several general reviews that provide
excellent and comprehensive overviews of analytical methods
as well as their geochronological and palaeoenvironmental
application. These reviews, however, focus predominantly on
speleothems, and one or two additional chapters reviewing
aspects of clastic sediments in similarly comprehensive manner
would have added further value to this book. The case studies,
on the other hand, are well referenced and have sufficient
topical and, to a lesser degree, geographical spread to
provide the reader with good starting points for further
study. The individual chapters are, overall, of high quality,
although not all of them contain abstracts and conclusions,
which is somewhat disappointing for an otherwise well-edited
book. Some useful colour plates are included and figures are,
with some unfortunate exceptions, accessible and of high
quality.
This is the first book focusing primarily on the study of cave
deposits. Given the detail and complexity covered, it is likely to
be of great interest to higher-level undergraduates, postgrad-
uates and academics with a specific interest in palaeoenviron-
mental reconstruction in general, and essential reading for
those with an interest in the study of cave sediments in
particular. Many aspects of this book could also be of interest
to some of the numerous hobby speleologists who want to
deepen an already fundamental knowledge on cave sediments.
With respect to the specific interest to readers of The Holocene,
it should be noted that most chapters in this book cover
timescales well exceeding the Holocene, going back in some
cases to the late Tertiary and beyond. Most chapters do,
however, cover aspects that are highly relevant to the study of
environmental change during the last 11 500 years.
Stefan H. Doerr
(University of Wales Swansea)
The long summer. How climate changed civilization
Brian Fagan, New York: Basic Books, 2004, 284 pp., US$15,
paperback. ISBN 0-465-02282-0
One of the banes of the increasing interdisciplinary investiga-
tion of archaeological phenomena is the intensification of
microspecialization that develops as new technologies continue
to emerge and evolve. Wait, that's not right: the new
technologies and microspecializations are boons to our under-
standing of human sociocultural development, but as the
specializations become more and more intricate, so do the
lexicons of jargon and arcane manipulations of terms, formulas
and other symbolic communication that more and more lead
to communication within the specializations rather than across
them in the interdisciplinary effort to explain what has been
going on. Moreover, even within the sphere of anthropological
prehistory, the pace of publication dealing with areal specia-
lizations (Andes, lowland Guatemala, southern Africa, South
Asian Subcontinent, US Central Plains, etc.) creates an over-
load on the information superhighway, in a way, something
that piles up in offprints that spill across desks, table-tops and
unsorted filing cabinets because of the mass of incoming
material. Pity the poor archaeology professor who is nominally
dedicated to an annually updated survey course on world
prehistory; where can one find the time to (1) understand what
the new guys are doing in the laboratories and (2) cover the
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entire globe during the summer break between academic
terms?
Books by Brian Fagan are a good start. Opposite the title
page, The long summer lists 21 books written or edited by him
that geographically span Europe, the Near East, Africa and
much of the New World; Fagan is human after all, since it
appears that even this craftsman has not found the time to
unravel the mysteries of East Asian developments. I suspect we
might be in a holding pattem on that situation, on the
other hand. One of Fagan's talents is his lyrical eloquence
that puts a vibrant texture on an otherwise drab and skeletal
framework of scientific terminology. His description of the
sudden transformation of the freshwater Euxine Lake to
become the Black Sea (pp. 111-13) is a case in point, where
the scale of change is expressed in human terms as well as
geological ones.
The long summer covers the past 20000 years, with the
Glacial Maximum serving as the backdrop for events that
would ensue with global warming. The Levant underwent
severe population pressures in the early Holocene as a
consequence of the Younger Dryas event, but Fagan notes
that this climatic calamity was likely the impetus for the
emergence of plant and (later) animal control, leading to fully
fledged agriculture and the (temporary or at least partial) relief
from reliance on what Nature had to offer to human survival.
Agriculture, as it developed in different parts of the world and
spread to others, resulted in unparalleled population growth,
all based on a tremulous foundation that could crumble at any
time given just the wrong combination of climatic factors.
Climatic fluctuation was instrumental in the vicissitudes of
cultural development throughout the world: Fagan covers
archaeological societies in Mesopotamia, Egypt, sub-Saharan
Africa, Europe, coastal California, Mexico and Guatemala,
and South America, all of which waxed or waned (even
disappeared) in terms of population, territory and influence
(including outright conquest), partly in response to climate
change or climate stability. References to recurring ENSO
(El Niuo-Southern Oscillation) events are particularly impor-
tant explanatory citations to the reasons for stability and
instability in the New World civilizations. Climate change was
not a 'prime mover' in the adoption of food production and
subsequent development of complex societies, but it admittedly
played a starring role in the success and failure of such cultural
developments.
Valuable as Fagan's book is for the non-specialist, there are
some glaring gaffes that call for amendments in a second
edition. First of all, Poland cannot be reached by rafting
down the Nekkar-Rhine Rivers (p. 115). Secondly, I can
scarcely believe that an arrow that is 90 cm long - with
or without projectile point - weighs less than 1 g (p. 73);
consider that a US penny weighs slightly more than 2 g, toss
the penny, then wonder how it could reach its intended target
on anything but an absolutely still, windless day. Furthermore,
the map on page 101 is abysmal in the placement of the
referent sites.
There are other specific (but very detailed) shortcomings in
the book, but the effects are not cumulatively disastrous.
Somewhere I've read, heard or imagined that Fagan's books
are 'popular accounts', directed to a general public that needs
special, hand-held guidance through the 'unexplained mys-
teries' of our prehistoric past. The implication of 'popular'
suggests that Fagan is not dealing with scholarship, and this is
absolutely not the case. Popular exposition is a valid aspect of
academic research, and all of us scholars and specialists can
benefit. There is also a vast public arena interested in human
physical and cultural evolution, and Fagan's works are a

valuable compensation to the lay public - after all, it is the
public that paid for all that research to begin with.
Gary 0. Rollefson
(Whitman College, Walla Walla WA, USA)
Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed
Jared Diamond, Viking Press: New York, 2005, 575 pp.,
£20.00, hardback. ISBN 0-670-03337-5
This book has both substantive and methodological impor-
tance for understanding the interaction of Holocene environ-
mental change and society. Most contributors to this journal
will take little convincing of the importance of this subject and,
indeed, we use it as one, if not the, justification for our
research, not least because there are lessons for the future
success of humankind on Earth. Consequently, the (natural)
environmental changes of the Holocene, especially decadal- to
millennial-scale climatic change and Holocene human impacts
on the (natural) environment, are currently at the forefront of
palaeoenvironmental research and outside interest in our field
has never been greater.
Progress in understanding these areas has been rapid but
there has been relatively little progress in understanding the
complexities of the impacts of natural and anthropogenic
Holocene environmental changes on societies: causal relation-
ships in particular are difficult to unravel in palaeoenviron-
mental reconstructions. Alongside this problem, alternative
explanations based purely on cultural, economic or political
factors commonly suggest environmental explanations are
neither necessary nor sufficient to account for societal change
even in extreme or marginal environments. The importance of
Jared Diamond's latest book lies in its comprehensive ap-
proach to the reciprocal relationships between environment
and society that takes account of the complexities of both. The
focus is on two big questions in the context of environmental
and societal change: (1) what caused the collapse of certain
societies and civilizations in the past when others succeeded;
and (2) are present-day societies also liable to collapse and, if
so, can such future collapses be avoided? The book is actually
divided into four parts: (1) modern Montana; (2) past societies;
(3) modern societies; and (4) practical lessons.
'Collapse' is defined in the book as 'a drastic decrease in
human population size and/or political/economic/social com-
plexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time' (p. 3).
Past collapses considered include those of Easter Island in the
Pacific, the Anasazi and Maya in North and Central America,
and the Norse Settlements in Greenland; modern collapses
include those of Haiti and Rwanda; while possible future
collapse is considered with reference to, amongst others, China
and Australia. The approach used is the comparative method.
Instead of merely considering the evidence for each collapse in
isolation, similar situations in which different combinations of
human and/or environmental factors co-existed are used as
natural experiments to shed light on likely causes. Thus, the
end of the Norse Greenland Settlements is compared with the
success of Iceland, the Faroe Islands and farming in Montana;
failure in Haiti is contrasted with success in the Dominican
Republic; and the fate of Easter Island is seen as an extreme
case with an unfavourable outcome in relation to more
favourable outcomes on other Pacific islands. The comparative
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Holocene book reviews 1103
method allows at least a first approximation to the likely
outcomes where various environmental conditions are com-
bined with particular societal choices.
Inadvertent damage inflicted by people on their environment
is seen in the book as only one of five sets of factors that may
or may not prove significant in bringing about collapse of a
particular society. The other sets of factors are labelled climatic
change, hostile neighbours, friendly trading partners and
societal response. However, it is the last of these - the societal
response to all the factors affecting it - that is seen to be
always of significance in determining whether a society
succeeds or fails in the face of its problems, whether they are
environmental or not. This thesis is argued in considerable
detail for a wide range of collapses and successes. The decline
and final extinction of the Norse in Greenland, for example,
involved all five sets of factors: the Norse inflicted considerable
environmental damage on a fragile ecosystem; they experi-
enced the climatic decline of the 'Little Ice Age'; trade links
with Norway eventually ended; there was conflict with the
Inuit; and they retained too much of a conservative outlook
based on their Christian European cultural values. The history
of Easter Island, in contrast, is revealed as a rare case of almost
pure ecological collapse induced by environmental damage
brought about by total deforestation, which led to internal
strife, overthrow of the elite and their stone statues, and
massive population decline.
Towards the second half of the book, the successes as well as
the failures provide a basis for considering environmental
problems in modern societies. Successful long-term mainte-
nance of past societies suggests there are grounds for optimism
in the future. This theme is exemplified by societies in places as
diverse as the highlands of New Guinea, the Pacific island of
Tikopia, Tokugawa Japan, and modern China, Australia and
the USA. Modern, first-world societies such as Australia
should not be complacent, however, in the face of environ-
mental degradation. Many past collapses occurred when the
leading, most technologically advanced civilizations of the day
were close to their peak affluence. Past successes reflected a
flexible attitude to perceived environmental problems and the
ability to avoid overexploitation and achieve sustainability. The
same characteristics are necessary to avoid future failure. At
present we have not only the benefits of hindsight but also the
advantages of a globalized world. This makes it impossible for
modern societies to collapse in isolation as they did in the past.
Nevertheless, while lessons can be learned quickly from
developments elsewhere, there are many internal and external
conflicts of interest that often lead to suboptimal decisions,
which arguably could have disastrous consequences and,
ultimately, produce global decline.
This important book has many messages for Holocene
science and for modern society. The main message for those
working on Holocene environmental change is that we need to
give further and deeper attention to the interface between the
fruits of our labours - i.e., reconstructions of natural environ-
mental change and inferred human impacts on past environ-
ments - and the societal factors that operated in the past. The
comparative method, as exemplified in this clear, yet sophis-
ticated book, is an edifying starting point from which to begin.
John A. Matthews
(University of Wales Swansea)