100 Books Like In Search of Chaco

The cliff-dwellings of Mesa Verde National Park are the most famous ruins in the Southwest. Mesa Verde was the USA’s first archaeological site to make UNESCO’s World Heritage list (later joined by Chaco Canyon, Cahokia, and Poverty Point). But there was much more to the story than the cliff-dwellings – defensive settlements, the last-gasp before the entire “Four Corners” region was completely depopulated, with towns moving out to modern descendant communities from the Hopi Pueblos on the west through the Pueblos of Zuni and Acoma, and to the many Rio Grande Pueblos on the east. More than cliff-dwellings: the largest “Mesa Verde” sites are not in the National Park, but instead villages and towns found across a 100-mile stretch from northwest New Mexico to southeast Utah. The organization doing the most important research in that larger Mesa Verde area is Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, in Cortez, Colorado – an organization… show more.

Contemporary with Mesa Verde’s cliff-dwellings and Chaco’s Great Houses, the Hohokam of southern Arizona too often fly under the radar. Their extensive settlements were constructed of mud and thatch – materials of the desert – and consequently Hohokam sites are mostly flat fields littered with potsherds. Ansel Adams never photographed a Hohokam site. There are exceptions: towering berms delimit oval ball courts (a local version of the Mesoamerican ball game) and vast canal systems which moved water many miles to the farm fields that underwrote the civilization. Hohokam was centered in Phoenix, but the civilization stretched from Gila Bend, Arizona on the west to Safford, Arizona on the east, and from Flagstaff on the north to Tucson on the south – the latter, the setting for my brief Hohokam fieldwork in the late 1980s. That fieldwork and my studies of Hohokam collections in museums, opened my eyes: I had no… show more.

One of the most important Southwestern sites isn’t in the USA’s “Southwest.” This is the site of Paquimé, in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Paquimé (pronounced pah-key-may) was the capital city of a region that encompassed much of northeastern Chihuahua and portions of southern New Mexico, from 1250 to 1450. While Pueblo people to the north recovered from the traumas of Chaco by deliberately simplifying their societies, Paquimé rose in glittering glory with a massive city center (hence Paquimé’s other name, Casas Grandes) surrounded by Mesoamerican-style ball courts, (small) pyramids, a football-field-long effigy of a plumed serpent, and all the wealth in the world: for example, copper artifacts fancier and more plentiful than at many central Mexican sites, and 500+ colorful macaws – birds brought up from the tropical south and bred at Paquimé.

The list of the architectural and artifactual wonders goes on and on. Archaeologists were aware of… show more.

My archaeological career began in 1971 in the Mimbres region of Southwestern New Mexico. I continued to work in the area, on and off, until 2013. Along the way, I wrote four books and many chapters/articles about Mimbres, and I formed some strong opinions on ancient Mimbres history.

Centered in the Mimbres River valley, the Mimbres built about twenty sizable stone villages at the same time as Chaco Canyon, from 1000 to 1125. Their towns were notably large for the time, fueled by sophisticated canal irrigation (probably adopted from the Hohokam, see above). But Mimbres is most famous for its remarkable black-on-white pottery: artfully-painted bowl interiors show bugs, fish, antelopes, birds, and people – people doing things, tableaus of daily life, esoteric rituals, mythical events. These images appeal strongly to us, today. In ancient times, however, Mimbres bowls and Mimbres art seems to have been limited to the Mimbres region… show more.

Meanwhile, in the American Southwest we have the Great House civilization of the “Anasazi” -- more correctly, the Ancestral Puebloan people -- renowned for creating Chaco Canyon and many other great cultural centers. (Chaco and its inhabitants figure strongly in my third book, Eagle and Empire.) Craig Childs’ book makes this area, and its peoples, and the sheer extent of their civilization, come alive. It’s a beautiful and evocative work of archeological detective work and exploration.

Real-life mysteries intrigue me, and one of the strangest unsolved cases involved a group of nine Soviet hikers in the area known as Dyatlov Pass. Preston and Child took this story, set it in the mountains of New Mexico, and weaved an enticing tale that kept me turning the pages and guessing right up to the end.

This is the fourth book of their Nora Kelly series, but it can easily be read as a stand-alone. 

Peeling back the stratigraphic layers of archaeology’s history, self-described “weirdshitologist,” archaeologist Jeb Card, reveals the discipline’s very “spooky” foundations in this riveting book. These foundations included a belief in a mythic time that preceded our modern world which has left behind its spoor in the form of eerie and phantasmagorical archaeological sites imbued with evil spirits, elves, pixies, djinn, elementals, and other paranormal entities. Card discusses haunted landscapes, bloodthirsty Druids, cursed mummies, and Lovecraftian “Old Ones” in his romp through all that is weird, strange, and, indeed, spooky in archaeology. Finally, Card shows that archaeology as presented on cable TV, YouTube videos, blogs, and social media is still haunted by the specter of Victorian Age beliefs about humanity’s presumably spooky past.

I have always admired people who can bring the past to life in a visual way and in this book, Victor Ambrose draws and paints the lives of people and places from the past.

The text is provided by Mick Aston, a well-known archaeologist of Time Team fame. Many of the places featured in this book were sites investigated by the Time Team. The book is full to the brim with excellent illustrations of places and perhaps importantly they are then peopled with interesting characters (for fans of Time Team, you may recognize a few faces).

This book makes it easy to travel back in time, to visualize what life may have been like for people way back when which is why I recommend it to any potential time travelers.

PS Look out for the cheeky dog…

Palace of King Minos at Knossos on Crete seized the imaginations of scores of modernist writers, artists, psychoanalysts, and philosophers as wealthy English archaeologist Arthur Evans had its ruins disinterred and reconstructed with reinforced concrete, a novel building material in the early twentieth century. Evans' imaginative palace complex is today mobbed by tourists (I recommend going off-season in January, as I did) who revere the Aegean as the birthplace of Civilization. Gere ties it in to Modernist projects rejecting Victorian overstuffed ornamentations in favor of supposed ancient purity. Her fascinating documentation of culture leaders from Freud to Le Corbusier buying into Evans' myth of an idealized past embeds archaeology in arts and humanities fashions that still confuse speculation with history.

In its original edition, Bruce Trigger's book was the first ever to examine the history of archaeological thought from medieval times to the present in worldwide perspective.

Now, in this new edition, he both updates the original work and introduces new archaeological perspectives and concerns. At once stimulating and even-handed, it places the development of archaeological thought and theory throughout within a broad social and intellectual framework.

The successive but interacting trends apparent in archaeological thought are defined and the author seeks to determine the extent to which these trends were a reflection of the personal and collective interests of archaeologists as these relate - in the West at least - to the fluctuating fortunes of the middle classes.

While subjective influences have been powerful, Professor Trigger argues that the gradual accumulation of archaeological data has exercised a growing constraint on interpretation.

In turn, this has increased the objectivity of… show more.