House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest

The standard story is that the Ancestral Puebloans vanished. Childs walks the actual ground to show they moved. He starts at Chaco and follows the trail out — the great houses at Aztec and Mesa Verde, the roads, the pottery styles and masonry techniques turning up in the next valley over, then the Kayenta country, then the huge migrations south into the Mogollon Rim and Casas Grandes. Every chapter is him out there on foot in a place, with archaeologists sometimes and alone plenty, arguing with the record. The people are the Hopi, Zuni, and Rio Grande Pueblos, who have said all along where they came from.