This book changed my life. Roberts was a mountaineer who fell hard for the Ancestral Puebloans and spent years walking to their sites in the canyons of southeast Utah and northeast Arizona — cliff dwellings on ledges you need a rope to reach, granaries, rock art panels, kivas. The book alternates his own trips with the history of the archaeology, including the Wetherills and the early looting that was indistinguishable from excavation. He argues with the professionals throughout, which is either the appeal or the problem depending on your view, and the descriptions of getting into hard-to-reach ruins are unmatched. I caught the bug nearly as bad as he did, and the book is one of the reasons why. Read it? Oh, a only a half-dozen times.
In Search of the Old Ones