In Praise of House of Rain

Craig Childs, author of House of rain : tracking a vanished civilization across the American Southwest, was in town at the end of last month. He gave a slideshow and talk up at the Wheelwright Museum; every last seat was taken and there was a long waiting list of people who hoped (in vain, in my case) to get in.

Childs is a terrific writer, and a man who hikes the wildernesses he writes about; the application of his unique on-the-ground perspective to questions of Chaco Canyon and Anasazi history is riveting.

There's a passage where archaeologist Jonathan Till is showing Childs and another archaeologist a Chacoan road in Utah. "Till led us down to where flat stones had been wedged, forming a staircase, some of the steps now gone, fallen into oblivion. Till reminded us to be careful. He was talking not about preserving our lives, but about not dislodging any of these placed stones, protecting the route. It had been used rarely in the past eight hundred years."

Or try this one. He has found an olivella shell in the dirt outside the ruin of an Anasazi granary deep in Canyonlands: "In all these years I had never encounted a single shell artifact in Utah, and now I could not suppress an astounded smile, the rush of promise quickening my blood. In my imagination lines of trade routes suddenly fired across the continent, long threads winding through deserts, over austere, cracked mesas to arrive here. It completed a triad for me: feathers from Mesoamerica, bighorns from the canyons, and a shell all the way from the sea... I slipped the shell back into the ground, and the three of us sat on boulders below the granary, looking across the dry mouths of farther canyons."

We have, of course, many many books about Chaco Canyon, about Puebloan archaeology, etc. They keep being published, we keep buying them. Some of the newer titles which bear on this train of thought are The great houses of Chaco by John Martin Campbell ; The peopling of Bandelier : new insights from the archaeology of the Pajarito Plateau, edited by Robert P. Powers ; The archaeology of Chaco Canyon : an eleventh-century Pueblo regional center, edited by Stephen H. Lekson ; Puebloan ruins of the Southwest by Arthur H. Rohn and William M. Ferguson ; Canyon gardens : the Ancient Pueblo landscapes of the American Southwest, edited by V.B. Price and Baker H. Morrow.