 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com | In this landmark work on the Anasazi tribes of the Southwest, naturalist Craig Childs dives head on into the mysteries of this vanished people.
The various tribes that made up the Anasazi people converged on Chaco Canyon (New Mexico) during the 11th century to create a civilization hailed as "the Las Vegas of its day," a flourishing cultural center that attracted pilgrims from far and wide, and a vital crossroads of the prehistoric world. By the 13th century, however, Chaco's vibrant community had disappeared without a trace.
Was it drought? Pestilence? War? Forced migration, mass murder or suicide? Conflicting theories have abounded for years, capturing the North American imagination for eons.
Join Craig Childs as he draws on the latest scholarly research, as well as a lifetime of exploration in the forbidden landscapes of the American Southwest, to shed new light on this compelling mystery. He takes us from Chaco Canyon to the highlands of Mesa Verde, to the Mongollon Rim; to a contemporary Zuni community where tribal elders maintain silence about the fate of their Lost Others; and to the largely unexplored foothills of the Sierra Madre in Mexico, where abundant remnants of Anasazi culture lie yet to be uncovered. |
Average Customer Rating:   Finessing A Delicate Issue This is an excellent book for non-specialists with a strong interest in Southwestern Prehistory. Childs is a superb writer which cannot be said of many who write about prehistory.This book has been much reviewed so I will comment only on one aspect. There is a raging controversy about the essence of Ancestral Puebloan Culture. One camp stresses lives of peace lived in harmony with nature. This is what you usually get in the visitor centers. Yet there has long been evidence of violence and some cannibalism. Native Americans are deeply disturbed by references to this aspect of their past as are many professional archaeologists. Childs obviously reads a lot of professional literature and talks to both archaeologists and Native Americans. His style is powerful and he so revivifies some episodes of violence that it is painful to read. In the Mesa Verde area some sites are destroyed amidst torture, slaughter, and cannibalism. Others sites appear to have been abandoned intact by people who chose to walk away. Most archaeologists seem to connect violence with Chaco. Childs quotes Hopi sources who comment on Chaco's dark nature and refuse to visit it. This implies that whatever was going on was resisted by some Native Americans and that as a group they may have learned to live more peacefully in later periods as a result of this cultural experience. Good, but could have been great. This was a good book on the Anasazi and the movements and changes of their culture over time. Childs did a good job bringing together information from alot of sources to draw an intriguing picture.
However there were a few things that I think held this book back from being even better book.
1. I'll agree with some of the other posters that some of his personal asides distracting, some were just annoying. Sometimes he seemed a bit too intent on showing us what a rugged naturalist he is, which really didn't add much to the story.
2. I wish he had fleshed out some of the surrounding context of the Anasazi a bit more. The Anasazi, like any culture, would have been influenced and affected by the sorrounding cultures, especially in the context of multiple migrations. For the most part Childs makes it sound like the Anasazi were operating in a bit of a vacuum, influenced only by themselves and the natural environment.
3. The biggest flaw was the lack of any real maps. One of the continuing themes in the book was the theory that the Anasazi structured their society around alignments in the landscape, over distances of hundreds of miles. Childs writes repeatedly about lines connecting villages, landscape features, and ceremonial sites. Maps showing these realtionships would have greatly supported the text. I'm really at a bit of a loss to explain the lack of maps. Unfortunately it left me questioning some of his conclusions a bit, which probably isn't warranted.
Flaws aside, this was a good book. I'd recommend it to anyone who has an interest in the southweat and it's cultures. Worth reading, but much chaff with the wheat I was ready to stop reading House of Rain after the first 100 pages or so, but decided to persevere after reading some of the many 5 star reviews.
Despite the wealth of information in the book, getting to the end, page 445, was a serious effort due to the author's frequent conjecturing and fantasizing. Yes, archaeologists, like any scientists, conjecture from the evidence that they have uncovered, but here it is taken to an extreme.
I estimate the book to be 25% fact, 60% speculation and flights of fantasy, and 15% introspection. Childs says as much on page 217 when imagining what another archaeologist might think about an example of rock art, "It is all storytelling, I thought. Flights of imagination and science. I was convinced that this scene overhead was a legend of migration, telling of a journey, but I was not an impartial judge. I had distances to cross myself."
The real value that Childs brings to this book is not as a storyteller, but rather that he has assimilated a vast amount of information (the bibliography is 22 pages) and has distilled it for the general reader based on years of personal experience. But, unfortunately, that distilled essence is then diluted over 445 pages.
The book is worth reading, but be prepared to devote a lot of time to it. An obvious alternative is "In Search of the Old Ones" by David Roberts, written 10 years before Childs's book. Although less comprehensive, it offers a very readable overview of the Anasazi and, like Childs, includes many examples of firsthand discoveries and re-discovered sites.
great book about cliff dwellers! My husband & I love to visit cliff dwellings . . . such a mystery about what happened to those people. Great book. Fascinating read, tremendous scope After studying the Ancient Puebloan cultures of the southwest for 25 years, mostly as an "armchair archaeologist", I feel like I have a pretty solid handle on that whole scene, and surprises are rare. Most of what I've read in the past though, focuses on particular areas in isolation without seriously attempting to tie them together as a cultural phenomenon. This book sparked a new sense of wonder for me, connecting the dots between the various well-known and less well-known (and almost unknown) sites and placing them in an overall context of movement, trade, and warfare across the Southwest and northern Mexico.
Although he has extensive contact with archaeologists and does a great deal of research, Child's book is clearly not simply a rehash of other peoples' ideas. He spells out his own informed hypotheses regarding the life and times of the Anasazi.
The author seems to be a combination Indiana Jones/mystic, and his actions can, at times, seem reckless, but make for a good read. My only complaint, and it's not enough to change my star rating, is that he tends to belabor some of his points unnecessarily, throughout the book.
Highly recommended for anyone interested in Southwestern archaeology. |  |
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