Brian Fagan, the Instructor

Wednesday, July 09, 2025

The news of Brian Fagan’s passing last week led me to reflect on the long history that he and I had together. Brian had a huge impact on my professional life as a publisher. He was the main archaeological consultant for AltaMira Press for a decade, was author of the first book we published there in 1995, and used his considerable sway to convince archaeologists to work with us. It was his vision to focus our publications program on practical books for CRM professionals that led to much of this success. When we launched Left Coast Press, he dropped his other commitments to quickly write us another book—  on writing archaeology*  -- the second offering released by the new press.  But our relationship began a quarter century before that.

It was Santa Barbara in 1970. Nightly news showed the ongoing carnage in Vietnam. Tar coated your feet from the previous year’s massive offshore oil spill . The charred remains of the Isla Vista Bank of America branch had barely cooled. Record players spun Dylan and the Byrds. Jimi and Janis would be dead by the end of the year. Simon was never mentioned without Garfunkel. Michael Jackson was that cute little boy in the Jackson 5. The Beatles were still together. Computers were larger than VWs and still used stacks of cards to process data. Telephones were plugged into walls. We all hated Nixon, the draft, ROTC, and the pigs.  And I was a sophomore at UC Santa Barbara. 

There was a complex maze of social science requirements to fulfill for my degree. Introduction to Archaeology fit one of the slots and sounded like it might be interesting. I signed up for Anthro 3, to be held in the largest lecture hall on campus, like many cattle call courses of 300 students of which I had already become accustomed. Good for sitting in the back rows and catching up on sleep. The lecturer was a young guy with features that caricatured my idea of an archaeologist in those pre-Indy Jones days. That British accent of scholarly authority, the jowls and full beard, weather-tested skin, the imposing presence of someone who had been raised to run an empire. Brian Fagan was only in his 3rd year at UCSB but was every ounce The Professor. His class turned out to be anything but those boring lecture courses that filled up Campbell Hall. We met there only once a week, when Professor discoursed on a topic he thought would interest us. Often it did. 

He hadn’t begun writing his own textbooks yet. Assigned textbooks were by Grahame Clark and Jim Deetz. Fagan inherited the class from the latter.  The core knowledge transmitted in the class came from a lab at which you could schedule visits a couple of times a week, sitting through a slide show narrated on tape by the same erudite professor with the clipped accent. Work sheets and study guides accompanied each of the 17 slidecasts. Five decades later, I realize that this was designed as an online class long before there was a line to be on. Brian was THAT far ahead of the curve.  

Though innovative, the slidecasts still presented a struggle to stay awake.  I was18 after all, and  my busy night life carried as much weight as daily coursework. We learned about relative and absolute chronology one week, economic reconstruction in another. Star Carr, the major site of Fagan’s mentor Grahame Clark, featured prominently in the slides. Worksheets ensured that we got the major points of the lectures, even without the professor there.   

-What are the limitations of the four main absolute dating techniques?**

-Under what conditions are seeds and vegetable remains found?    

And then came the final exam: questions on Olduvai Gorge, origins of food production, and earliest settlement of the Americas. Sounds pretty mundane, despite the alternative method of delivery?

There was, though, that one class session, probably the reason I am an archaeologist 55 years later. The Prof showed up for the weekly lecture, told us to pack up our pens and notebooks (for anyone under 40 reading this: laptops, ipads, iphones didn’t exist in 1970), and follow him out the door. With his fierce stride, still recognizable decades later, he quick marched us away from campus buildings to where the university grounds splashed into the Pacific Ocean. Over the next hour, he showed us the outline of the World War II gun emplacement along the beach cliffs, the remains of a Chumash shell midden, and several other archaeological sites peeking out at the edge of campus, pointing out the clues scholars used to identify these places as ancient sites. I was awestruck by the archaeologist’s magical ability to see the past from a few broken stones on the ground. I still am.

Despite its pedagogical innovation, Brian’s class was not my favorite at UCSB. In that era of revolutionary social movements, Professor Shirk’s history lectures suggested that cooperation and teamwork required of rowers on Athenian warships formed the social bonds that led to democracy. That easily trumped Brian explaining Childe's theories of development of societal complexity. So did the Shakespeare prof and one or two other instructors' talks. But when I arrived in Jerusalem for my junior year exchange program, I signed up for another archaeology class because of what Brian had revealed to us by the UCSB lagoon.

Roll the clock forward three decades. I’m running AltaMira Press and working with Brian on a host of archaeological projects. My daughter Alexis starts at UCSB and has to meet the same requirements I did.  She signs up for Anthro 3, still taught by Brian Fagan. He insisted on teaching the intro class every semester to spread the archaeological gospel. By then his first textbook was in its 5th or 6th edition.  The class has been dramatically transformed into a true online experience designed by Brian and his collaborator George Michaels. There was even an "online" to host it.

I don’t how Brian felt when I told him that he had been teaching the same class so long that he had trained two full generations of undergraduates. No matter. I know I was not the only student to become an archaeologist out of Brian’s engaging teaching methods. What else could a professor ask for?

© Scholarly Roadside Service

*A second edition is coming out from Routledge in 2026. He just finished the revision a few weeks ago.

**No, I don’t have a perfect memory stretching back 50 years. Vida claims I have difficulty remembering things she told me 50 seconds ago. Those class handouts survived various purges of old, useless files as I spent decades teaching archaeology and thought I might want to use some of that material someday. Never did. But the handouts from Anthro 3, Winter 1970, were still peacefully resting in a dust-filled filing cabinet and are illustrated here.

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