If you get serious about Southwest archaeology, this is the book that ends up on your shelf, and the third edition from 2012 is the current one. Linda Cordell taught at New Mexico and Colorado and was about as central to the field as anybody gets; Maxine McBrinn came on for this edition, and Cordell died the year after it came out. It runs the whole thing. What the country is and who’s been living in it. How you actually date a site and read what’s in the dirt. The first people, 13,000 years back. Corn showing up and changing everything. Chaco, the Hohokam canals, Casas Grandes. The big shuffles of the 1200s and 1300s when everybody picked up and moved. Then the Spanish, and on to now. What makes it worth the money is that it doesn’t just tell you what happened, it tells you who’s fighting about it and hands you the footnotes to go look. It’s a textbook. It reads like one in places. So what?