Childs walks canyons and leaves what he finds where it lies. That’s his position going in, and this book is him spending four years having it argued out of him. He sits with private collectors who’ve got Mimbres bowls on the shelf and no apologies. He talks to museum curators sitting on warehouses of material nobody has looked at in fifty years. He’s in Blanding after the federal raids that swept up local families who’d been digging pots for generations. He goes to Alaska, where people sell their own ancestors’ work because that’s the money there. And he owns up to his own worst act, lifting a pot from a public display and putting it back in the desert himself. Nobody comes out clean, including him, and the ground gets more interesting the longer he stands on it.