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, 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, and the descriptions of getting into hard-to-reach ruins are unmatched. I caught the bug nearly as bad as he did, and this book is one of the reasons why. Read it? Only a half-dozen times so far.
In Search of the Old Ones