An award-winning author and veteran mountain climber takes us deep into the Southwest backcountry to uncover secrets of its ancient inhabitants. In this thrilling story of intellectual and archaeological discovery, David Roberts recounts his last twenty years of far-flung exploits in search of spectacular prehistoric ruins and rock art panels known to very few modern travelers. His adventures range across Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and southwestern Colorado, and illuminate the mysteries of the Ancestral Puebloans and their contemporary neighbors the Mogollon and Fremont, as well as of the more recent Navajo and Comanche.
An exuberant, hands-on fly-on-the-wall account that combines the thrill of canyoneering and rock climbing with the intellectual sleuthing of archaeology to explore the Anasazi. David Roberts describes the culture of the Anasazi—the name means “enemy ancestors” in Navajo—who once inhabited the Colorado Plateau and whose modern descendants are the Hopi Indians of Arizona. Archaeologists, Roberts writes, have been puzzling over the Anasazi for more than a century, trying to determine the environmental and cultural stresses that caused their society to collapse 700 years ago. He guides us through controversies in the historical record, among them the haunting question of whether the Anasazi committed acts of cannibalism. Roberts’s book is full of up-to-date thinking on the culture of the ancient people who lived in the harsh desert country of the Southwest.
According to archaeologist Stephen H. Lekson, much of what we think we know about the Southwest has been compressed into conventions and classifications and orthodoxies. This book challenges and reconfigures these accepted notions by telling two parallel stories, one about the development, personalities, and institutions of Southwestern archaeology and the other about interpretations of what actually happened in the ancient past. While many works would have us believe that nothing much ever happened in the ancient Southwest, this book argues that the region experienced rises and falls, kings and commoners, war and peace, triumphs and failures. In this view, Chaco Canyon was a geopolitical reaction to the "Colonial Period" Hohokam expansion and the Hohokam "Classic Period" was the product of refugee Chacoan nobles, chased off the Colorado Plateau by angry farmers. Far to the south, Casas Grandes was a failed attempt to create a Mesoamerican state, and modern Pueblo people--with societies so different from those at Chaco and Casas Grandes--deliberately rejected these monumental, hierarchical episodes of their past. From the publisher: The second printing of A History of the Ancient Southwest has corrected the errors noted below. SAR Press regrets an error on Page 72, paragraph 4 (also Page 275, note 2) regarding "absolute dates." "50,000 dates" was incorrectly published as "half a million dates." Also P. 125, lines 13-14: "Between 21,000 and 27,000 people lived there" should read "Between 2,100 and 2,700 people lived there."
Explores the Colorado Plateau and Four Corners region of Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico, looking at the history, geography, and people of the southwestern part of the country.
A comparative history of the relocation and removal of indigenous societies in the Greater American Southwest during the mid-nineteenth century Lost Worlds of 1863: Relocation and Removal of American Indians in the Central Rockies and the Greater Southwest offers a unique comparative narrative approach to the diaspora experiences of the Apaches, O’odham and Yaqui in Arizona and Sonora, the Navajo and Yavapai in Arizona, the Shoshone of Utah, the Utes of Colorado, the Northern Paiutes of Nevada and California, and other indigenous communities in the region. Focusing on the events of the year 1863, W. Dirk Raat provides an in-depth examination of the mid-nineteenth century genocide and devastation of the American Indian. Addressing the loss of both the identity and the sacred landscape of indigenous peoples, the author compares various kinds of relocation between different indigenous groups ranging from the removal and assimilation policies of the United States government regarding the Navajo and Paiute people, to the outright massacre and extermination of the Bear River Shoshone. The book is organized around detailed individual case studies that include extensive histories of the pre-contact, Spanish, and Mexican worlds that created the context for the pivotal events of 1863. This important volume: Narrates the history of Indian communities such as the Yavapai, Apache, O'odham, and Navajo both before and after 1863 Addresses how the American Indian has been able to survive genocide, and in some cases thrive in the present day Discusses topics including Indian slavery and Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, the Yaqui deportation, Apache prisoners of war, and Great Basin tribal politics Explores Indian ceremonial rites and belief systems to illustrate the relationship between sacred landscapes and personal identity Features sub-chapters on topics such as the Hopi-Navajo land controversy and Native American boarding schools Includes numerous maps and illustrations, contextualizing the content for readers Lost Worlds of 1863: Relocation and Removal of American Indians in the Central Rockies and the Greater Southwest is essential reading for academics, students, and general readers with interest in Western history, Native American history, and the history of Indian-White relations in the United States and Mexico.
Famed adventure writer David Roberts retraces the route of the legendary Domínguez-Escalante expedition. In July 1776, Franciscan friars Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante set out from Santa Fe to blaze a pathway to the new Spanish missions in California, across the huge expanse of what would become the American Southwest. In October, in western Utah, ravaged by hunger and cold, the twelve-man team had to turn back. Stymied by the raging Colorado River, killing their horses for food, the men saw an exploring expedition transformed into a fight for survival. In this chronicle of adventure and history, David Roberts retraces the Spaniards’ forgotten route, using Escalante’s diary as his guide. Blending personal narrative with critical analysis, Roberts relives the glories, catastrophes, and courage of this desperate journey.
It was about 13,000 years ago that the First Americans, people who came from Asia, worked their way past the melting glaciers of the last Ice Age and began spreading across North, Central, and South America - lands previously unscarred by humans and teeming with mammoths, giant bison, saber-toothed tigers, and beavers the size of a cow. But it's only recently that scientists have pieced together the elusive, compelling saga of that epic migration. And the more we learn about them, the more we must marvel at the courage, adaptability, enterprise, and enduring resilience of the First Americans. Most of us know little about the early Americans and the wonders they achieved. Some of them learned to hunt forty-ton whales from dugout canoes; others built a vast system of canals that irrigated crops on tens of thousands of acres. Fully a thousand years before the pyramids at Giza went up, people on the Mississippi River were constructing even larger pyramidal earthworks, and later, a thousand miles to the north, others built a city that would remain the largest in North America until after the Revolutionary War. In the cradle of civilization that evolved in Central America, the Olmecs, Mayans, and Aztecs built complex cultures and dazzling cities whose monumental structures and works of art still have the power to awe and inspire. This book describes the peopling of North and Central America and examine their amazing societies - the farmers and cliff-dwellers of the Southwest United States, the mound-builders of the Midwest, the Northwest Coast whale-hunters with their potlatches and totem poles, and the mighty, gods-driven cultures of Mesoamerica. It is a saga as breathtaking as it is surprising.
The American Southwest is one of the most important archaeological regions in the world, with many of the best-studied examples of hunter-gatherer and village-based societies. Research has been carried out in the region for well over a century, and during this time the Southwest has repeatedly stood at the forefront of the development of new archaeological methods and theories. Moreover, research in the Southwest has long been a key site of collaboration between archaeologists, ethnographers, historians, linguists, biological anthropologists, and indigenous intellectuals. This volume marks the most ambitious effort to take stock of the empirical evidence, theoretical orientations, and historical reconstructions of the American Southwest. Over seventy top scholars have joined forces to produce an unparalleled survey of state of archaeological knowledge in the region. Themed chapters on particular methods and theories are accompanied by comprehensive overviews of the culture histories of particular archaeological sequences, from the initial Paleoindian occupation, to the rise of a major ritual center in Chaco Canyon, to the onset of the Spanish and American imperial projects. The result is an essential volume for any researcher working in the region as well as any archaeologist looking to take the pulse of contemporary trends in this key research tradition.
Biography of the man who discovered the prehistoric ruins at Mesa Verde, Colorado, and began the excavation of Pueblo Bonito at Chaco Canyon, New Mexico.
"Gripping and superb. This book will steal the night from you." —Laurence Gonzales, author of Deep Survival On January 17, 1913, alone and near starvation, Douglas Mawson, leader of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, was hauling a sledge to get back to base camp. The dogs were gone. Now Mawson himself plunged through a snow bridge, dangling over an abyss by the sledge harness. A line of poetry gave him the will to haul himself back to the surface. Mawson was sometimes reduced to crawling, and one night he discovered that the soles of his feet had completely detached from the flesh beneath. On February 8, when he staggered back to base, his features unrecognizably skeletal, the first teammate to reach him blurted out, "Which one are you?" This thrilling and almost unbelievable account establishes Mawson in his rightful place as one of the greatest polar explorers and expedition leaders. It is illustrated by a trove of Frank Hurley’s famous Antarctic photographs, many never before published in the United States.
