This sweeping history of hunting is the archaeologist and anthropologist Brian Fagan’s final book, helped into publication by his friend and collaborator Nadia Durrani. Fagan was an extraordinarily prolific writer, and his ability to communicate with popular audiences is much in evidence here, though Fagan emphasises that this was a particularly difficult challenge. To make sense of hunting in a smartly paced survey is a major achievement. This is particularly welcome given that ‘man the hunter’ narratives continue to (mis)shape the popular understanding of hunting and human nature.
Fagan stresses the significance of the Neolithic pivot from hunting to animal husbandry, after which hunting became a leisure pursuit for the powerful, even as it remained a recourse for the hungry poor. Hunting and farming would coexist for millennia, but Fagan structures his book largely around the development of elite hunting practices, such as the royal hunt with its conspicuous display of wealth and martial virtues, and the opportunity for en chasse diplomacy. Fagan does not neglect ‘the humbler chases of regular folk’, and he is eloquent on the continuities linking (for example) Congo hunter-gatherer societies and Australian Aborigines to our ancestral past.
Some of the shifts are inevitably abrupt – we go, for instance, from the Sun King to John Muir in the blink of an eye – and the argument becomes fragmented the closer we come to our own day. The complex politics of hunting are not fully covered, and I could have done with more on so-called poaching and the connections between conservation and hunting. The absence of discussion of contemporary indigenous hunting practices is the biggest omission. The reader learns a lot, however: I had no notion of hunting cheetahs trained to ride on the backs of horses in Islamic Asia, nor Mongol postal relays using gyrfalcons.
Seeing red