In Fishing: How the Sea Fed Civilization, Fagan provides a descriptive narrative overviewing the long role that fishing has played in shaping humanity's journey, from early opportunistic fishers to present-day industrialized fishers, who have harvested fisheries to the verge of collapse. The book is written in a style that makes it accessible to the archaeological community as well as the general public. Given the reasonable price, this book would make a wonderful addition to any archaeological library and would be an ideal read for many graduate and undergraduate courses.

Fagan organizes the book into three sections: “Opportunistic Fishers,” “Fishers in the Shadows,” and “The End of Plenty.” Each section provides a number of well-studied examples detailing the uniqueness of fishing strategies used by people around the world and how fish and fishing supported societies and civilization. The “Opportunistic Fishers” section begins with Fagan speculating on the resourceful fishing practices of our hominin ancestors, who likely used simple tools to capture fish when other resources may have been in short supply. This opportunistic means of fishing persisted for millennia as human civilizations existed on the plentiful resources in oceans, lakes, rivers, and streams. Fagan continues this section by providing a detailed review of several thoroughly investigated ancient societies that evidence our understandings of ancient fishing practices. He includes an overview of those people living along the coasts of the North Sea in Japan, the Pacific and Gulf of Mexico coasts of North America, and the southwest Pacific Islands. Although each of these societies made extensive use of fish, which in many cases formed the basis of people's protein-based diets, Fagan details the distinctive innovations each group developed to harvest the fish and shellfish specific to their environmental circumstances.

In the second section, “Fishers in the Shadows,” Fagan emphasizes the forgotten role of fishing in the rise of the state and how humans turned subsistence fishing into a commodity-based industry supporting state endeavors. Fagan reviews the role of commoditized fishing in the rise of the Egyptian empire, the Roman Empire, the Sumerians of Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, the Chinese dynasties, and the Andean state, among others. In Egypt, the masses of workers that built the pyramids of Giza were supported by an industry that harvested and preserved thousands of fish captured out of the Nile River. In the Roman Empire, people constructed fish-salting facilities along the coast where they took large hauls of tuna and mackerel. These preserved fish and fermented fish sauces became a substantial product of the Roman economy. And along the Yangzi River, Asian carp aquaculture gave rise to an intensive fish and fish product industry in China. Fagan emphasizes the current evidence that fish and shellfish supported the rise of these early states, providing food for people as well as commodities traded and sold.

In the third section, “The End of Plenty,” Fagan reviews the circumstances that led people to shift their fishing efforts from inshore fisheries to previously unexploited areas and, eventually, to the depletion of fisheries. He details those religious and social circumstances that by AD 1200 prompted Europeans to demand more fish. These demands stimulated greater efforts to preserve fish and pushed fishers to employ new technologies, including massive fishing vessels, long-lining, and trawling, farther from the coastline and pursue new fisheries. Fagan reviews the archaeological evidence of the shift from local exploitation to more international fisheries, where people purchased and ate fish from far-off places. Even as people fished with what we now consider ancient technologies, they depleted both inshore and offshore fisheries.

Fagan finishes this millennial review of human fishing efforts to arrive at our current state of global fisheries and international markets. He details the state of current global fishing hauls as we now see declines in industrial catches. Scholars believe that many fisheries now are fished at biologically unsustainable levels. Fagan ends the book by noting that if humanity does not drastically adjust how we catch, market, and consume fish, we may be at a point where oceans become deserts rather than the seas of plenty that sustained humans and our ancestors for millions of years. This book brings together decades of research highlighting the longevity and importance of fishing practices leading to the current state of our fisheries and is an important contribution to archaeology.