A scholarly regional survey of Ancestral Puebloan occupation across the Colorado Plateau — covering architecture, land use, migration, and the deep continuity between ancient and living Pueblo peoples. Note: exact bibliographic identity of this volume is uncertain; treat as representative of the University of Utah Press Colorado Plateau archaeology series.
A scholarly survey of Ancestral Puebloan occupation of the Colorado Plateau, and the book to have on the shelf when the question of who lived here, for how long, and in what relationship to the people who live here now comes up in a conversation at camp. Where Plog's Ancient Peoples is the general Southwest overview, this book zeroes in specifically on the Colorado Plateau — the canyons, the mesa tops, the cliff dwellings, the outlying farms, the major centers from Chaco to Mesa Verde to Hovenweep. The specificity is the value.
The architectural material is particularly strong. The book walks through the major site types — great houses, unit pueblos, cliff dwellings, tower complexes — with diagrams, photographs, and the archaeological reasoning for how each site is interpreted. You come out of the reading able to look at a ruin on the landscape and make a reasonable guess at its period, its likely function, and its place in the broader settlement pattern. That is a specific literacy that very few visitors to the region have, and having it will change every hike you take in canyon country afterward.
I pull this book out before any trip that will pass Ancestral Puebloan sites — which, on the plateau, is most trips. The Escalante, the San Juan, Grand Gulch, Cedar Mesa, the loops around Bears Ears. Reading the relevant regional chapter before a trip means you arrive at the sites with the interpretive framework already loaded. The granary on the ledge is not just a ruin. It is part of an agricultural system you can reconstruct. The petroglyph panel is part of an ongoing tradition whose continuity has been documented. The difference between looking at a site cold and looking at it with the book's framework is, frankly, the difference between tourism and genuine encounter.
The connection to living Pueblo peoples is a throughline. The book does not treat Ancestral Puebloan archaeology as a disconnected artifact. The contemporary Hopi, Zuni, and Rio Grande Pueblo communities are treated as the direct descendants they are, and their oral histories and continuing relationship to specific sites is part of how the book reads the archaeology. That orientation is now standard in the discipline, but the book was early enough to be part of why it became standard, and you can feel the care of the framing.
Keep this one on the shelf next to Plog and Childs. The three together give you the working library for understanding the deep human history of the Colorado Plateau, and the plateau reads differently once that library is in your head, forever. Every visit after is a denser visit, which is the point.
