House of Rain
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
A "beautifully written travelogue" that draws on the latest scholarly research as well as a lifetime of exploration to light on the extraordinary Anasazi culture of the American Southwest (Entertainment Weekly).
The greatest "unsolved mystery" of the American Southwest is the fate of the Anasazi, the native peoples who in the eleventh century converged on Chaco Canyon (in today's southwestern New Mexico) and built what has been called the Las Vegas of its day, 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 in engineering -- were astounding, rivaling those of the Mayans in distant Central America.
By the thirteenth century, however, the Anasazi were gone from Chaco. Vanished. What was it that brought about the rapid collapse of their civilization? Was it drought? pestilence? war? forced migration? mass murder or suicide? For many years conflicting theories have abounded. Craig Childs draws on the latest scholarly research, as well as on a lifetime of adventure and exploration in the most forbidding landscapes of the American Southwest, to shed new light on this compelling mystery.
Customer Reviews
Interesting subject, needlessly extravagant narration
While the subject of this book, the Ancestral Purbloans, is interesting; the fact that the author/narrator is clearly in love with the sound of his own voice. Needless exposition & overly extravagant descriptions of things like shadows, sunrises, room shape, etc. take away from the subject matter. The author/narrator seems to desperately want to romanticize every experience, & instill some sort of profound mysticism to the most minor of details. Having been to numerous ancestral Puebloan sites, both as a person interested in the history, & as an Archaeologist, I can say that the author presents these locations in a manner more similar to Psuedo-Native American derived New Age spirituality, rather than in a historical or anthropological way.