House of Rain, by Craig Childs

House of Rain is an archaeological journey through the American Southwest, starting with Chaco Canyon and ending in the northern Sierra Madre in Mexico. Childs, not himself a credentialed archaeologist, is a man driven by curiosity and imagination who, rather than bowing to the accepted narrative of ancient peoples, looks for himself at the ruins, the pottery patterns, the feathers and burials and architecture, and reaches his own conclusions. He works with and discusses with many bona-fide archaeologists his ideas, his finds, and his questions. 

Some discount his theories, others offer bolstering evidence. By examining not only maps but the land itself, he makes connections, observing for example the ruler-straight meridians connecting Chaco Canyon with other population centers, and standing on heights where signal fire remains are visible, communicating across distances to other groups. His writing is detailed and lovely as he conveys the inhospitality of the landscape, chronicling visits in the depths of winter, the scorch of high summer, in pouring rain and parching drought. He spends a lot of time climbing in and out of precipitous canyons, and the safety-maven in me is often annoyed by his lack of top-ropes, communication devices, and other rudiments of preparedness for dangerous climbs. But the people he is learning about surely made these same climbs and descents, sometimes supported by holds carved into rock or wood ladders, but other times likely using methods similar to his, to reach their destinations. 

Childs’s overarching question is about the Anasazi (a misnomer which he uses as representative of a vanished culture without applying further definition to it) – why did they “disappear”? The archaeological record suggests that they abandoned Chaco Canyon and its outposts in the twelfth century AD. Looking at the layers of use in ruins, he concludes that they were migratory people, moving in response to conditions, especially drought and the absence of game to hunt. He sees that groups left a particular site in cycles of several centuries, their descendants returning as conditions improved, then after a few generations, moving on again. 

It was not abandonment but a shifting – they took their culture with them into territories of greater abundance – of water, of game. In some cases they strongly influenced the groups among whom they resided – occasionally dominating, possibly enslaving, the inhabitants; in other cases they built their structures in the very midst of the locals’, as if thumbing their noses at what they considered lesser cultures. 

He goes out on a limb, making the case that the Anasazi culture and its successors extended from Chaco Canyon into the Sierra Madre, citing trade in tropical birds from Mesoamerica, turquoise, and pottery designs to support his thesis. Some archaeologists agree with him, but the prevailing narrative separates events and groups in Mexico from those in what later became the US, as though the boundaries we maintain now have always existed. 

I am struck by the respect with which he treats these sites: often he finds burial areas, pottery shards, weavings, feathers and other artifacts. He handles them with care and respect, then returns them to where he found them. This conforms to modern field practice, but it is also a choice we feel he would make anyhow: these things should remain where their makers left them.