Fishing
How the Sea Fed Civilization
by Brian Fagan
This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app
1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date Sep 26 2017 | Archive Date Sep 29 2017
Description
In this history of fishing—not as sport but as sustenance—archaeologist and best-selling author Brian Fagan argues that fishing was an indispensable and often overlooked element in the growth of civilization. It sustainably provided enough food to allow cities, nations, and empires to grow, but it did so with a different emphasis. Where agriculture encouraged stability, fishing demanded movement. It frequently required a search for new and better fishing grounds; its technologies, centered on boats, facilitated movement and discovery; and fish themselves, when dried and salted, were the ideal food—lightweight, nutritious, and long-lasting—for traders, travelers, and conquering armies. This history of the long interaction of humans and seafood tours archaeological sites worldwide to show readers how fishing fed human settlement, rising social complexity, the development of cities, and ultimately the modern world.
Advance Praise
Marketing Plan
A conversation with Brian Fagan:
Why has no one attempted a history of fishing before?
It’s only recently that archaeologists have looked seriously at ancient fishing. Their discoveries have taken the story back two million years. Only now can we write a history of human opportunism that began in early prehistory and continues into modern times.
Were some civilizations more reliant on fish than others? Which were the most dependent?
Pre-industrial civilizations depended on rations to feed large numbers of people. Dried fish helped feed the workers who built the Egyptian pyramids. The Khmer rulers who built Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom relied heavily on cat fish from the Tonlé Sap Lake. The Moche warrior-priests of coastal Peru depended on anchovy fisheries for much of their subsistence.
Did fishing influence civilization in ways that distinguish it from land-based food sources?
The important thing about fish is that it can be dried or salted, then transported in large quantities for use as rations by soldiers and sailors, among others. Dried cod was the beef jerky of Norse voyagers in the North Atlantic. It kept well and kept for months.
At what point do we begin to see evidence of overfishing?
Fish bones are hard to analyze. But it’s likely that overfishing occurred in ancient Egyptian times, when fish farming began, as well as in the Roman Mediterranean. There is evidence from fish sizes that the rich cod fisheries of the North Atlantic were overexploited as early as the seventeenth century.
Praise for Brian Fagan's The Great Warming:
“[A] fascinating account of shifting climatic conditions and their consequences.”—New York Times
“Fagan is a great guide. His canvas may be smaller than Jared Diamond's Collapse, but Fagan's eye for detail and narrative skills are better.”—New Scientist
“[A] thought-provoking read, which marshals a remarkable range of learning.”—Financial Times
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9780300215342 |
| PRICE | $30.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 368 |
Readers who liked this book also liked:
Tahir Hamut Izgil
Biographies & Memoirs, History, Nonfiction (Adult)
