Brian M. Fagan

Brian Murray Fagan (1 August 1936 – 1 July 2025) was a British author of popular archaeology books and a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He went on to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he studied archaeology and anthropology (BA 1959, MA 1962, PhD 1965). He spent six years as keeper of prehistory at the Livingstone Museum in Zambia, Central Africa, and moved to the USA in 1966.

Fagan was an archaeological generalist, with expertise in the broad issues of human prehistory. He was the author or editor of 46 books, including seven undergraduate college texts. Fagan contributed over 100 specialist papers to many national and international journals. He was a contributing editor to Archaeology Worldwide, American Archaeology and Discover Archaeology magazines, and formerly wrote a regular column for Archaeology Magazine. He was on the editorial boards of six academic and general periodicals, and contributed to Scientific American and Gentleman's Quarterly.

Fagan chose to teach introductory archaeology to large undergraduate classes at Santa Barbara. Avoiding traditional lecture formats, he experimented with technology from the 1970s to provide basic information, leaving his class periods for wide-ranging discussions of interest to students.

In conjunction with this interest in college teaching, Fagan began writing a series of archaeology textbooks beginning in 1972 that are still in print. These include In the Beginning (13th edition, 2013, with Nadia Durrani), People of the Earth (15th edition, 2018, with Nadia Durrani), Ancient North America (5th edition, 2019), Ancient Lives (7th edition, 2020, with Nadia Durrani), World Prehistory (9th edition, 2016, with Nadia Durrani), Ancient Civilizations (4th edition, 2016, with Chris Scarre), and Archaeology: A Brief Introduction (12th edition, 2016, with Nadia Durrani). These are designed for beginners. His approach melds traditional cultural history with more recent approaches, with an emphasis on writing historical narrative using archaeological data and sources from other disciplines.

Fagan was an archaeological consultant for organisations including National Geographic Society, Time-Life, Encyclopædia Britannica, and Microsoft Encarta. He lectured about archaeology and other subjects at venues including the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, the National Geographic Society, the San Francisco City Lecture Program, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Getty Conservation Institute.