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The First North Americans
Brian Fagan
Brian Fagan is one of the great popularizers of archaeology, and here he tackles the enormous question of how and when people first settled North America. *The First North Americans: An Archaeological Journey*, published by Thames & Hudson, sweeps from the earliest arrivals across the Ice Age land bridge to the complex societies the Europeans later encountered, drawing on genetics, climatology, and hard-won fieldwork as much as on stones and bones. Fagan writes with unusual clarity and momentum, turning technical debates—Clovis-first versus earlier arrivals, the megafauna extinctions—into a genuinely readable story. It's a synthesis, not a monograph, aimed at the curious general reader, and it does that job about as well as the genre allows. A fine one-volume way into the deep human history of the continent.
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The author
Brian M. Fagan (b. 1936) is a British-born archaeologist who spent his career at the University of California, Santa Barbara and became perhaps the most widely read author of archaeology for general audiences, with dozens of textbooks and popular titles on ancient climate, exploration, and the human past.
The book
The First North Americans, issued by Thames & Hudson in its Ancient Peoples and Places tradition, surveys the archaeology of the continent's first inhabitants from initial settlement to the eve of European contact. Fagan folds in recent DNA and paleoclimate research alongside the excavation record, keeping the emphasis on how we know what we know.
How it has aged
The peopling of the Americas is a fast-moving field, and specific dates and models keep shifting as new sites and ancient-DNA studies appear. Fagan's framing and storytelling hold up well, though readers should treat the precise chronology as a snapshot of scholarship around its publication.
For more context
The book sits alongside Fagan's Ancient North America and The Great Journey, and speaks to ongoing debates about pre-Clovis sites and the timing of the first migrations.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Brian Fagan
- Publisher
- Thames & Hudson
- Place of publication
- London
- Year
- 2011
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- History
- Location
- Maine