In anticipation of the Anasazi our of the Southwest (aka my vacation), I've been soaking up as much information about the subject as possible. Architectural studies, archaeological studies, personal travelogues, histories of the sites, profiles of the Europeans who "discovered" them, you name it.
Here's a few:
Mesa Verde National Park: Shadows of the Centuries by Duane A. SmithYes, this book is about Mesa Verde, but no, it's not about the Anasazi. Smith is less interested in Mesa Verde as the home of prehistoric Indians and more concerned with the history of the site as a National Park. If you're interested in a behind-the-scenes look at National Park administration, by all means, read this book. But if you're interested in the Anasazi, the homes they built in the cliffs, or the region...skip it.
Chaco Handbook: An Encyclopedia Guide by R. Gwinn VivianThis book is written in an encyclopedic style, offering brief descriptions of nearly every facet of (known) Anasazi culture and archeology. Organized alphabetically, it's an easy reference to thumb through when you need to know what a
sipapu is. With that said, it's not the kind of book you sit down and read. Reference material only.
House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest by Craig ChildsI'm still reading this one, and at 512 pages, I might actually have the pleasure of reading this one
at Chaco Canyon a couple weeks from now. More personal narrative than history book, it's interesting and absorbing, but I can't escape the feeling that it's slightly overwritten. If that's the worst thing I can say, then it's not so bad. I suspect this book might actually make a decent companion during my trip.
In Search of the Old Ones by David RobertsI read this one last year in anticipation of the planned but aborted 07 expedition, and I guess this is the one that germinated the idea. It's a personal story in the vein of
House of Rain but with less literary fluff. Fascinating and informative and probably the book I'd recommend to people with a passing interest in the pre-history of the Four Corners region. Informative enough to learn something, but doesn't require a massive investment in time.
Ancient Ruins of the Southwest: An Archaeological Guide by David Grant Noble This book takes a more expansive view of "ancient ruins," devoting sections to Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon but also including many of the thousands of Native American ruins still preserved in the deserts of the Southwest, some of them little known or studied. It gives you a sense of the impressive scope of Anasazi culture, which thrived in the inhospitable deserts of AZ, UT, CO, and NM.
People of Chaco by Kendrick Frazier So far, this has been one of the more useful books I've gotten about the subject. From the title, you can see that it's not about the architecture or the archaeologists who first studied the Anasazi sites. It's about the people who lived there and how they survived. And as fascinated as I am about their dwellings and the things that they left behind,
how they lived is really the tractor beam pulling me down south.
But this list is missing one book that is of particular interest to me. That would be
Man Corn: Cannibalism and Violence in the Prehistoric American Southwest by Christy Turner III. It's a controversial book that draws a controversial conclusion about a controversial subject: Anasazi cannibalism.
It's a fact that at least some of the Anasazi were cannibals. It's not known if this was a normal custom in their culture or an aberration that arose because of hunger or warfare. Human bones have been found with evidence of cannibalism and as recently as five years ago, a human coprolite (which is basically a petrified turd) was found with human Myoglobins in it, indicating that whoever had taken that particular dump had, in fact, consumed and digested human flesh shortly before hand.
From the Amazon description:
Turner has uncovered what he considers to be incontrovertible evidence of human sacrifice and cannibalism in a part of the world once thought to have been free of such horrors: the American Southwest. There, Turner maintains, thousands of burned and broken human bones, sometimes buried en masse, have been uncovered, most in sites ranging from a thousand to a few hundred years old. In one such site, the Arizona village of Awatovi, dozens of suspected witches were massacred by their fellow Hopis; in another, the great mountaintop city of Mesa Verde, Colorado, several pits containing the remains of cannibalized murder victims have been excavated. Turner suggests that the great Anasazi city of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, may have been a center of violent ritual and cannibalism, which helps explain why modern Indian residents of the region shun it as a place of bad medicine.
I've read enough about the Anasazi to accept the possibility of cannibalism, but I don't buy Turner's hypothesis.
I won't go into the reasons now, but I will say that "modern Indian residents" don't shun Chaco Canyon as "a place of bad medicine." They might say that to white men, but the truth is that Chaco Canyon is the Garden of Eden to many tribes of the area. It is the place where their ancestors arrived in this world from the last one and they consider it to be sacred, not cursed.
I still want to read the book, though, if only to pick it apart its theories. Unfortunately, it's $65.00 on Amazon ($44 used) and well, I can't justify spending $65.00 on a single book, even one that stokes my curiosity.
But if I find it in the Chaco Canyon giftshop for a more reasonable price....I'm snagging it.
