Burrillo took the long way to Cedar Mesa — upstate New York, then New Orleans tending bar for five years trying to be a writer, then seasonal work in Glacier and two summers on the North Rim, which is where the Colorado Plateau sank its hooks into him. He went back to school at Northern Arizona and Utah and became an archaeologist. This is 12,000 years of southeastern Utah, from the first people through the Basketmakers and Ancestral Puebloans to the Ute, Navajo, and Paiute who are still there. He’s good on how looting and pothunting shaped the region, and on how the study of archaeology itself got built out of this ground and the bad behavior that came with it. Then the national monument fight after Trump gutted it by eighty-five percent. Burrillo helped write the technical guts of the lawsuit that followed, so he’s not pretending to be neutral. He’s funny, too, which you might not expect from an archaeologist.