The Lost World of the Old Ones: Discoveries in the Ancient Southwest

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 20 JUL 2015

This rather puzzling book, a sequel of sorts to In Search of the Old Ones (1996), is a detailed guide to the archaeology of the American Southwest, particularly the areas inhabited by the Anasazi, or (in what Roberts terms "p.c." parlance) "Ancestral Puebloans." Roberts, a mountaineer and amateur archaeologist, received both praise and criticism for his earlier work, notably for the amount of attention it drew from visitors to Utah's Cedar Mesa site. In this followup, Roberts states that his goal is to offer readers an account of the most exciting and revealing research that has been produced about the region in the past 20 years but instead he includes only long-winded anecdotes about his fellow climbers, archaeologists, and colorful local characters. The book is awkwardly situated among the genres of travelogue, adventure story, and scholarly monograph; it is insufficiently dramatic to satisfy on the first two counts, and the lack of footnotes undermines its success on the third. Puzzlingly, the book's illustrations include neither maps nor photos of artifacts, such as the Telluride blanket, to whose discovery and interpretation Roberts devotes an entire chapter. Roberts's love for the Southwest and its precolonial cultures emerges clearly, but his execution in producing this book is far less successful.