How the earth’s previous global warming phase, from the 10th to the 15th centuries, reshaped human societies from the Arctic to the Sahara – a wide-ranging history with sobering lessons for our own time
From the 10th to 15th centuries the earth experienced a rise in surface temperature that changed climate worldwide—a preview of today’s global warming. In some areas, including Western Europe, longer summers brought bountiful harvests and population growth that led to cultural flowering. In the Arctic, Inuit and Norse sailors made cultural connections across thousands of miles as they traded precious iron goods. Polynesian sailors, riding new wind patterns, were able to settle the remotest islands on earth. But in many parts of the world, the warm centuries brought drought and famine. Elaborate societies in western and central America collapsed, and the vast building complexes of Chaco Canyon and the Mayan Yucatan were left empty.
As he did in his bestselling The Little Ice Age, anthropologist and historian Brian Fagan reveals how subtle changes in the environment had far-reaching effects on human life, in a narrative that sweeps from the Arctic ice cap to the Sahara to the Indian Ocean. The history of the Great Warming of a half millennium ago suggests that we may be yet be underestimating the power of climate change to disrupt our lives today—and our vulnerability to drought, writes Fagan, is the “silent elephant in the room."

Brian Fagan is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Born in England, he did fieldwork in Africa and has written about early man, forensic archaeology, and many other topics. His books on the interaction of climate and human society have established him as a leading authority on the subject; he lectures frequently around the world. He is the editor of The Oxford Companion to Archaeology and the author of Fish on Friday: Feasting, Fasting, and the Discovery of the New World; The Little Ice Age; and The Long Summer,Í among many other titles.
“In this latest and most delightful of his books, Brian Fagan weaves a detective story of Friday fish-eating, climate change, and ship design to guess who beat Columbus to the New World.”—Jared Diamond on Fish on Friday
“Could do for the historical study of climate what Michel Foucault's classic Madness and Civilization did for the historical study of mental illness”—Scientific American on The Little Ice Age
"Fagan has become our foremost explicator of the material record concerning the human past.”
--Anthony Aveni, author of Conversing with the Planets