8 books
Charles C. Mann
I think we know by now that what they taught us in school was…hmm…not always accurate. 1491 is the first book that opened my eyes to just how not accurate. Reporting from archaeology, anthropology, genetics, and ecology, Charles C. Mann…
David E. Stuart
Everybody wants Chaco to be a mystery. Stuart, an anthropologist at New Mexico who’s spent his career out there, knows it isn’t. It was a boom town. Great houses five stories high, dead-straight roads running for miles across nothing, macaws…
Craig Childs
Craig Childs went looking for the first people in the Americas by walking the ground they walked, back when the map looked nothing like it does now. Sea level was 400 feet lower, an ice sheet sat on Canada, and…
Craig Childs
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…
Craig Childs
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…
David Roberts
This book changed my life. Roberts was a mountaineer who fell hard for the Ancestral Puebloans and spent years walking to their sites in the canyons of southeast Utah and northeast Arizona — cliff dwellings on ledges you need a…
David Roberts
Comb Ridge is an eighty-mile monocline running from Utah into Arizona, dense with Ancestral Puebloan sites, and nobody had ever traversed the whole thing on foot. Roberts did it with Greg Child and Vaughn Hadenfeldt — three men in their…
David Roberts
The sequel to In Search of the Old Ones, twenty years on. He revisits sites and finds some wrecked by visitation and others still untouched, and pushes into new country — Range Creek in Utah, kept private by one family…
