24 books
Charles C. Mann
I think we know now that what they taught us in school was…hmm…not always accurate. 1491 is the first book that opened my eyes to just how not accurate. Reporting from archaeology, anthropology, genetics, and ecology, Charles C. Mann upends…
James C. Scott
Everybody knows the story: People figure out farming, settle down, build cities, and civilization takes it from there. Scott, an anthropologist and political scientist at Yale who spent his life studying how regular people dodge governments, points out the timeline…
David E. Stuart
Everybody wants the ruins of Chaco Canyon to be a mystery. Stuart, an anthropologist at New Mexico who’s spent his career there, knows it isn’t. Chaco was a boom town. There were great houses five stories high, dead-straight roads running…
Linda S. Cordell and Maxine McBrinn
If you get serious about Southwest archaeology, this is the book that ends up on your shelf, and the third edition from 2012 is the current one. Linda Cordell taught at New Mexico and Colorado and was about as central…
Craig Childs
Craig Childs went looking for the first people in the Americas by walking the ground they walked, back when the map looked nothing like it does now. Sea level was four hundred feet lower, an ice sheet sat on Canada,…
R.E. Burrillo
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…
Ekkehart Malotki
Almost everybody looking at rock art goes hunting for the pictures — the sheep, the hunters, the spirals with a story attached. (It’s the reason I drive past Mojave scratches to get to Colorado Plateau galleries.) Malotki and Dissanayake point…
Alex Patterson
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,…
Craig Childs
Craigs Childs walks canyons and leaves what he finds where it lies. That’s his position going in, and this book is him spending four years having it argued out of him. He sits with private collectors who have Mimbres bowls…
Craig Childs
The standard story is that the Ancestral Puebloans vanished. Childs walks the actual ground to show they moved. He starts at Chaco and follows the trail out — the great houses at Aztec and Mesa Verde, the roads, the pottery…
David Roberts
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…
Rebecca Wragg Sykes
Smug Homo sapiens have long looked down on Neanderthals, like city folk sneering at country cousins. Snort. You couldn’t even not go extinct. But these hominins have always gotten a bad rap, and Rebecca Wragg Sykes’s affectionate synthesis of a…
Bill Broyles
El Camino del Diablo runs across the driest corner of the Sonoran Desert, and for centuries the only reliable water on it was Tinajas Altas — a stack of natural rock basins in a granite ravine, filled by the rare…
Robert G. Bednarik
Bednarik is a self-taught Australian researcher with more than a thousand papers and no formal degree, and he has spent his career telling the rock art field it is making things up. This is the catalog of that. Natural cracks…
Richard A. Rogers
Rogers is a communication scholar, and his subject isn’t what rock art meant but what we keep doing with it. Visitor centers, guidebooks, New Age tours, corporate logos, and the shaman theory all get examined as acts of appropriation, each…
David Roberts
Comb Ridge is an eighty-mile monocline running from Utah into Arizona, dense with Ancestral Puebloan sites, and nobody had ever traversed the whole thing on foot. Roberts did it with Greg Child and Vaughn Hadenfeldt — three men in their…
Yuval Noah Harari
This is the whole span of the species in one volume, organized around three revolutions: Cognitive, agricultural, scientific. Harari’s central move is that what let us take over wasn’t intelligence exactly but the ability to believe in things that don’t…
Christina Thompson
How did people reach every habitable island across ten million square miles of Pacific, upwind, centuries before Europeans could cross an ocean at all? Thompson takes the whole history of that question: Cook and his crews puzzling over it, missionaries,…
David Roberts
For thirty years, David Roberts made annual pilgrimages from his home in Massachusetts to Four Corners canyon country, land he loved passionately. The last time we almost crossed paths in person, he was renting a house in Bluff and I…
Stephen Lekson
Lekson noticed that Chaco Canyon, Aztec Ruins, and Paquimé in Chihuahua sit within a few minutes of longitude of one another, hundreds of miles apart, and built at different times from one another over four centuries. His premise is it…
David Graeber
The standard story of human civilization development argues we went from small egalitarian bands, to farming, to cities, and then inevitable hierarchy and the state. Graeber, an anthropologist, and Wengrow, an archaeologist, spent ten years arguing that’s baloney. Evidence shows…
David Grann
In 1925, Percy Fawcett, the most experienced explorer in the Amazon, walked into the Mato Grosso with his son and his son’s friend looking for a city he called Z, and none of them came out. Something like a hundred…
David Roberts
The sequel to In Search of the Old Ones, twenty years on. He revisits sites and finds some wrecked by visitation and others still untouched, and pushes into new country — Range Creek in Utah, kept private by one family…
Ann Zwinger
Here are five canyons on Cedar Mesa in Southeast Utah — Grand Gulch, Slickhorn, Johns, Fish, and Owl — walked and camped and described by a naturalist who was also a fine draftswoman. Zwinger addresses the geology and the plants…
