Here are 100 books that In Search of Chaco fans have personally recommended if you like
In Search of Chaco.
Book DNA is a community of 13,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I was Curator of Archaeology at the Museum of Natural History, University of Colorado, Boulder; recently retired. Before landing at the University of Colorado, I held research, curatorial, or administrative positions with the University of Tennessee, Eastern New Mexico University, National Park Service Chaco Project, Arizona State Museum, Museum of New Mexico, and Crow Canyon Archaeological Center. Over four decades, I directed more than 20 archaeological projects throughout the Southwest. I wrote a dozen books, chapters in many edited volumes, and scores of articles in journals and magazines. While many of these were technical treatises, I also tried to write scholarly books accessible to normal intelligent readers.
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…
Mesa Verde, with its stunning landscapes and cliff dwellings, evokes all the romance of American archaeology. It has intrigued researchers and visitors for more than a century. But "Mesa Verde" represents more than cliff dwellings--its peoples created a culture that thrived for a thousand years in Southwestern Colorado and southeastern Utah. Archaeologists have discovered dozens of long-buried hamlets and villages spread for miles across the Great Sage Plain west and north of Mesa Verde. Only lately have these sites begun to reveal their secrets.
In recent decades, archaeologists have been working intensively in the Mesa Verde region to build the…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I was Curator of Archaeology at the Museum of Natural History, University of Colorado, Boulder; recently retired. Before landing at the University of Colorado, I held research, curatorial, or administrative positions with the University of Tennessee, Eastern New Mexico University, National Park Service Chaco Project, Arizona State Museum, Museum of New Mexico, and Crow Canyon Archaeological Center. Over four decades, I directed more than 20 archaeological projects throughout the Southwest. I wrote a dozen books, chapters in many edited volumes, and scores of articles in journals and magazines. While many of these were technical treatises, I also tried to write scholarly books accessible to normal intelligent readers.
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…
For a thousand years they flourished in the arid lands now part of Arizona. They built extensive waterworks, ballcourts, and platform mounds, made beautiful pottery and jewelry, and engaged in wide-ranging trade networks. Then, slowly, their civilization faded and transmuted into something no longer Hohokam. Are today's Tohono O'odham their heirs or their conquerors? The mystery and the beauty of Hohokam civilization are the subjects of the essays in this volume. Written by archaeologists who have led the effort to excavate, record, and preserve the remnants of this ancient culture, the chapters illuminate the way the Hohokam organized their households…
I was Curator of Archaeology at the Museum of Natural History, University of Colorado, Boulder; recently retired. Before landing at the University of Colorado, I held research, curatorial, or administrative positions with the University of Tennessee, Eastern New Mexico University, National Park Service Chaco Project, Arizona State Museum, Museum of New Mexico, and Crow Canyon Archaeological Center. Over four decades, I directed more than 20 archaeological projects throughout the Southwest. I wrote a dozen books, chapters in many edited volumes, and scores of articles in journals and magazines. While many of these were technical treatises, I also tried to write scholarly books accessible to normal intelligent readers.
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…
In the mid-1560s Spanish explorers marched northward through Mexico to the farthest northern reaches of the Spanish empire in Latin America. They beheld an impressive site known as Casas Grandes in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Row upon row of walls featured houses and plazas of what was once a large population center, now deserted. Called Casas Grandes (Spanish for “large houses”) but also known as Paquimé, the prehistoric archaeological site may have been one of the first that Spanish explorers encountered. The Ibarra expedition, occurring perhaps no more than a hundred years after the site was abandoned, contained a…
The problem is not with the actions young women take but with the toxic, sexist conditions they are responding to.
Tanenbaum found, based on six years of interviews with young people ages 14-30, that young women are navigating a culture littered with gendered dress codes, revenge porn, and sexually explicit…
I was Curator of Archaeology at the Museum of Natural History, University of Colorado, Boulder; recently retired. Before landing at the University of Colorado, I held research, curatorial, or administrative positions with the University of Tennessee, Eastern New Mexico University, National Park Service Chaco Project, Arizona State Museum, Museum of New Mexico, and Crow Canyon Archaeological Center. Over four decades, I directed more than 20 archaeological projects throughout the Southwest. I wrote a dozen books, chapters in many edited volumes, and scores of articles in journals and magazines. While many of these were technical treatises, I also tried to write scholarly books accessible to normal intelligent readers.
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…
People have called the mountains, rolling hills, wide valleys, and broad desert plains of southwestern New Mexico home for at least ten thousand years. When they began to farm a little over two thousand years ago, they settled near the rich soils in the river floodplains. Then, around 900, the people of this region burned all of their kivas and started gathering in large villages with small ritual spaces and open plazas. Between 900 and about 1100, they also made the intricately painted geometric and figurative bowls today called Mimbres, their best-known legacy. Then, in the 1130s, they stopped making…
My twin passions are science and history, and I try to have it both ways by writing a mix of alternate history and hard SF. I grew up in Yorkshire, England, enjoyed lots of family vacations at Hadrian’s Wall and other Roman-rich areas, and acquired degrees in Physics and Astrophysics from Oxford, but I’ve lived in the US for over half my life and now work for NASA (studying black holes, neutron stars, and other bizarre celestial objects). My novella of a Roman invasion of ancient America, A Clash of Eagles, won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History and formed the starting point for my Clash of Eagles trilogy from Del Rey, and Hot Moon, my alternate-Apollo thriller set entirely on and around the Moon, will be published by CAEZIK SF & Fantasy in 2022.
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.
The greatest 'unsolved mystery' of the American Southwest relates to the Anasazi, the native peoples who in the 11th century converged on Chaco Canyon (now New Mexico) and built a flourishing cultural center that attracted pilgrims from far and wide, a vital crossroads of the prehistoric world. The Anasazis' accomplishments - in agriculture, in art, in commerce, in architecture and engineering - were astounding, rivaling those of the Mayans in distant Central America. By the 13th century, however, the Anasazi were gone from Chaco. Vanished. What was it - drought? pestilence? war? forced migration? mass murder or suicide? Craig Childs…
I’m fascinated by ancient America and visit archaeological sites everywhere I go. I scooted off as soon as we moved to Missouri in 2000 to see Cahokia, the mother of all Mississippian cities. My fascination began in the late 90s when I visited Etowah Indian Mounds, off I-75 north of Atlanta. I was amazed: huge, flat-top pyramids nearly as big as those in Mexico. A large plaza, probably used for ceremonies and ball games. An excellent museum with jewelry, bodily adornments, figurines, and sculptures from as far away as the East Coast, Gulf of Mexico, and Illinois. Who were these people? What kind of city was this? No one told me about any of this!
Can I say I love the pictures most of all? I love the pictures. And maps. But 50? Why not 100! 200! (I know why: 50 is a nice round, familiar, patriotic number)
What I loved about this book was that it paid so much attention to Midwestern sites I can, and have, explored – Adena, Hopewell, Mississippian – and many places still on my list. It doesn’t dwell on the cliff dwellings and cities in stone in the west, what most people think of when they think of Indian towns.
And I love that it includes petroglyph and pictographic sites in the West, only a few of which I have visited. So this book is a joy and a torture: all these places I have yet to see!
Presenting "the real deal" of American antiquity-as opposed to the hyped fare of many cable TV shows-Kenneth Feder invites readers to explore the stunning technological, architectural, engineering, and artistic achievements of America's first peoples.
Part travel guide, part friendly reference, Ancient America showcases fifty iconic and publicly-accessible sites located across the contiguous United States-including monumental pyramids of earth, "castles" ensconced in cliff niches, and vast rock art galleries. Among the places profiled are four World Heritage Sites (Chaco Canyon, NM; Mesa Verde, CO; Cahokia, IL; Poverty Point, LA); numerous Historic Landmarks and National Monuments (including Crystal River, FL; Town Creek…
Crossing is a vividly human re-imagining of the love, sacrifices, and accomplishments that two Chinese brothers - American Immigrants - experience as they travel to California to build the Transcontinental Railroad.
I’ve always enjoyed mystery and suspense stories—Agatha Christie and Mary Higgins Clark being two of my all-time favorite authors. Throw in some legends and folklore, and I’m hooked. I like well-crafted stories that keep me turning the pages. Those that stump me in figuring out the mystery are a plus for me. I love books with descriptive settings that place me, as the reader, in the heart of the action.
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.
In 2008, nine mountaineers failed to return from a winter backpacking trip in the New Mexico mountains. At their last campsite, searchers found a bizarre scene: something had appeared at the door of their tent so terrifying that it impelled them to slash their way out and flee barefoot to certain death in a blizzard. Despite a diligent search, only six bodies were found, three violently crushed and missing eyes and tongues. The case, given the code name “Dead Mountain” by the FBI, was never solved.
Now, two more bodies from the lost expedition are unexpectedly discovered in a…
Observant of the world around me, and intellectual, I discovered my ideal way of life at age 16 when I read Kroeber's massive textbook Anthropology, 1948 edition. Anthropologists study everything human, everywhere and all time. Archaeology particularly appealed to me because it is outdoors, physical, plus its data are only the residue of human activities, challenging us to figure out what those people, that place and time, did and maybe thought. As a woman from before the Civil Rights Act, a career was discouraged; instead, I did fieldwork with my husband, and on my own, worked with First Nations communities on ethnohistorical research. Maverick, uppity, unstoppable, like in these books.
I was at the landmark conference in 1987 that legitimated critical analyses of archaeological work and the socio-cultural parameters in which it takes place. We were all surprised at the numbers, range of interests, range of professional standing of the participants, and enthusiasm––all reflected in the papers in this book. Dipping into it startles with the diversity of persons and places and times affecting the history of archaeology. Feminist concerns were loud and clear and critiqued from a supportive standpoint. Pair this with Trigger's magisterial history to see how he distilled a multitude of disparate activities oriented to the past, into his deeply discerning long story.
In 17 critical essays, the first book to address the historiography of archaeology evaluates how and why the history of archaeology is written.
The emphasis in the first section is on how archaeologists use historical knowledge of their discipline. For example, it can help them to understand the origin of current archaeological ideas, to learn from past errors, and to apply past research to current questions. It can even be integrated into the new liberal arts curricula in an attempt to instruct students in critical thinking.
The second section considers the sociopolitical context within which past archaeologists lived and worked…
Having lived in the countryside for more than two decades and fallen for its charms, I find myself fascinated by its heritage. Rural history is often overlooked for the grand stories of royalty, urban life, and warfare. For me, the archaeology and history that speaks of daily life, practical struggles, and the humanity of people–that’s what really switches me on. I constantly yearn to get inside the minds of our ancestors to try and understand how they saw the world. Whether that’s strange superstitions or ingenious inventions, it’s all part of what it means to be human.
Since hunter-gatherer times, our relationship with animals has been full of contradictions. We relied on them not only as a source of food and traction but also worshipped and deified creatures through the millennia.
This feisty and, at times, refreshingly irreverent book pulls together everything we know about the cultural history of human-animal relationships, from pampered pets to sacrificial offerings.
Zooarchaeology, the study of ancient animals, is a frequently side-lined subject in archaeology. This 'important and provocative' volume, now available in paperback, provides a crucial reversal of this bizarre situation - 'bizarre' because the archaeological record is composed largely of debris from human-animal relationships (be they in the form of animal bones, individual artifacts or entire landscapes) and many disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, and geography, recognise human-animal interactions as a key source of information for understanding cultural ideology. By integrating knowledge from archaeological remains with evidence from texts, iconography, social anthropology and cultural geography, Beastly Questions: Animal Answers to Archaeological…
At five years old, Kasiel was found with the pointed ends of his ears cut off. Despite that brutal start, he’s lived twelve peaceful years with the man who took him in. Keeping his hair long over his mutilated ears helps him hide the fact that he is Vanrian, a…
When we were young and naughty, our parents only had to give my sister The Look, and she’d burst into tears. Me, I would stare right back at them and demand, “What?” Fiercely. In fact I often got in trouble for “arguing,” (when all I was really trying to do was make my case because I felt misunderstood). These days people describe me as someone who doesn’t care what other people think. I forge my own path, staunchly, proudly, and so I am drawn to heroines who do the same, who fly in the face of societal expectations to fight for truth and science and what is right.
I was taken by this book from the moment I read the description. An intrepid archaeologist and fossil hunter trespassing on the lands of a hermit who literally wants her to get off his lawn? What could possibly go wrong! In Effie we have another heroine who is interested in science, knows her own biology, and is quite willing to explore it with the right sort of man. She’s a virgin, but she’s not a wilting young flower. She’s more of a curious pragmatist. In Max we have another damaged hero, and oh my goodness I am a sucker for a hero with terrible events in his past which have left him with physical scars as well as mental ones. I also love a good grumpy sunshine trope.
After losing all he holds dear in a horrific fire, Max Aldersley, Earl of Rivenhall, shuns the world - until he catches Effie Nithercott digging holes on his estate! He banishes the intrepid archaeologist and the disturbing feelings she rouses within him. But she returns even more determined and infuriatingly desirable than before! He's determined she'll never reach the man beneath the scars...no matter how deep she digs!
