archaeology

Charles Mann's history of the pre-Columbian Americas dismantles every assumption you learned in school. The hemisphere before 1492 was more populous, more urban, and more ecologically managed than anyone imagined. A book that redraws the map of human civilization.

David Stuart's archaeological study of the Ancestral Puebloan civilization of the American Southwest. Stuart argues that Chaco Canyon was the center of a complex, interconnected society that collapsed when its resources ran out — a parable with obvious modern parallels.

Childs again, this time tracing the routes of the first Americans across a continent of glaciers, megafauna, and landscapes that no longer exist. Part archaeology, part adventure, part thought experiment about what it meant to walk into a world no human had ever seen.

David Roberts retraces the 1776 Domínguez-Escalante expedition through the American Southwest — the first Europeans to cross the Colorado Plateau. Roberts walks the same ground 240 years later and finds both the landscape and the history more complicated than the maps suggest.

Craig Childs on the ethics of taking artifacts from the wild. Who owns a thousand-year-old pot found in a Utah canyon? The museum? The government? The Pueblo descendants? Nobody? Childs doesn't answer the question so much as make you feel the weight of it.

Craig Childs follows the trail of the Ancestral Puebloans across the desert — from Chaco Canyon to the Mogollon Rim — looking for evidence of where they went when they left. Part archaeology, part desert travel, part detective story about a civilization that didn't vanish so much as disperse.

The book that launched a thousand forays into the desert canyons of southern Utah and northern Arizona chronicles David Roberts’ unlikely evolution from bleeding edge alpinist to Native American archaeology geek. The young Alaskan climbing gun fell hard for the grit of red soil, the call of a canyon wren, and most of all the powerful, obsessive allure of the Ancestral Puebloans who wrote the canyon walls with paint and sculpted soaring cliff dwellings. His book beautifully conveys how curiosity becomes passion, how intrigue becomes compulsion, and for budding fans of the Southwest and the people once known as Anasazi there’s no better place to start.

Lesley Poling-Kempes profiles the women — archaeologists, writers, artists — who explored the canyonlands of the Southwest in the early twentieth century. Women who did the work, rarely got the credit, and left records that are only now being recognized.

The first complete traverse of Comb Ridge in southern Utah — 100 miles of sandstone monocline, packed with Ancestral Puebloan ruins. Archaeology on foot, in one of the most remote landscapes in the Lower 48.

Roberts exploring Ancestral Puebloan ruins across the canyonlands — cliff dwellings, granaries, rock art. Each site is a detective story about a people who left and didn't leave a forwarding address.