Alex Patterson flew P-51s in the war, spent a career at IBM, retired, then went back to school and made himself an anthropologist. This came out of that second life, in 1992, and it’s still the standard — seventeen printings, 93,000 copies, and versions in the gift shops of about every national monument bookstore in the Southwest.
He gathered six hundred commentaries on individual symbols from more than a hundred archaeologists, anthropologists, and Native people, and organize the whole thing so you can actually use it standing in front of a panel. There’s a pictorial key up front and five hundred line drawings, arranged by what a figure looks like or what it might mean. Spirals, handprints, flute players, bighorns, mazes, birds, shields. He’s scrupulous about the guessing — every reading is somebody’s attribution, cited, and often two people flatly disagree on the same page.