|
|
|
Reviews
| House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization across the American Southwest. By Craig Childs. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2007. xiv + 496 pp. Photos, bibliography, glossary, and index. $24.99 (cloth).
|
|
I was prepared to dislike Craig Childs's latest book, House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization across the American Southwest. My first exposure to his writing was his widely published movie review of Mel Gibson's Apocalypto (2006), in which he presented himself as a "researcher in ancient American archaeology"—and thus, presumably, credentialed to speak to the accuracy of the film. If so, he was the lone archaeologist to defend Gibson's interpretation of the pre-Hispanic Maya. Soon thereafter, as editor of the Society for American Archaeology's trade magazine, The Archaeological Record, I received a letter from several archaeologists associated with the American Museum of Natural History who railed against what they saw as Childs's denigrating view of American Indian peoples, his misrepresentation of professional anthropology, and the questionable and possibly illegal behavior recounted in House of Rain. Just as I was prepared to pick up my own pitchfork and join the anti-Childs mob, an archaeologist for whom I have great respect told me that Childs was misunderstood and unfairly maligned. As a researcher in American archaeology myself, I had to read the book and make up my own mind. |
1
|
|
House of Rain is part adventure tale and part synthesis of the pre-Hispanic history of the Puebloan Southwest. Childs starts his journey at the eleventh-century pilgrimage center of Chaco Canyon, a stunning place where the ancestors of today's Pueblo people blended architecture and landscape on an immense scale that covered much of what is today New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado. Although Chaco Canyon was largely depopulated by the middle of the twelfth century, Chaco still appears in the oral histories of indigenous peoples of the Southwest. Childs first explores the archaeology of the canyon and then sets out on a path north to Mesa Verde, west to Utah, and finally south into Arizona and Mexico. His path is both literal—in the sense that he spends much of the narrative four-wheeling, backpacking, climbing, and volunteering on archaeological excavations across these lands—and a metaphorical account of the movement of migrants out of Chaco Canyon and ultimately into the Sierra Madre of northern Mexico. |
2
|
|
Childs's prose is engaging and his adventures often exciting. Although the book is substantial, at 445 pages of text and infrequently illustrated, it is enjoyable to read. He deftly sets up the narrative so that it never seems too scholarly and dry even as it describes a lot of complex archaeology. Childs includes an impressive bibliography of published material, although the focus of his knowledge and most of his ideas about the pre-Hispanic history of Pueblo people are seemingly gleaned from archaeologists whom he interviews throughout the book. |
3
|
Ultimately, however, Childs's journalistic approach to the pre-Hispanic history of the Puebloan Southwest provides plenty of grounds for criticism. His adventures take precedence over the archaeology, and by focusing on his own personal travels, the dynamic nature of the human past is largely lost. Although Childs is cautious never to make outrageous claims, the impression he must sustain to fit his narrative is that large numbers of people left Chaco and moved en masse on a single path into Mexico. Evidence takes the form of conveniently selected facts culled from the archaeological and ethnographic records, and skeptical scholars he encounters are portrayed as too unimaginative or too constrained by their methods. His singular Puebloan history revolves heavily around migration and warfare, sensationalized beyond what the archaeology supports. And by the end of the book, Childs's migrants disappear into the chaos of Contact-era Mexico, providing no sense of continuity with the true descendents of the Puebloan past, some sixty thousand of whom still live in the U.S. Southwest today.
John Kantner
School for Advanced Research
|
4
|
|
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|