#000075
Anasazi: Ancient People of the Rock
David Muench (photographs) & Donald G. Pike
Anasazi: Ancient People of the Rock pairs David Muench's luminous landscape photography with Donald G. Pike's text to evoke the vanished civilization that built the great stone cities of the American Southwest. Published in 1974, it moves through the canyon country of Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon, Canyon de Chelly, and Kayenta, where the Ancestral Puebloans—long called the Anasazi, a Navajo word for “the ancient ones”—raised cliff dwellings and ceremonial kivas before dispersing around 1300. Muench's images give the ruins and their red-rock setting a hushed grandeur, while Pike sketches what archaeology can and cannot tell us about who these people were and why they left. It's very much a handsome coffee-table book of its era, more evocation than up-to-date scholarship, and the term “Anasazi” has since given way to “Ancestral Puebloans.” Still, for lovers of the Southwest, of ruins, or of landscape photography, it remains a beautiful and atmospheric introduction.
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The authors
David Muench is a celebrated American landscape photographer known for large-format color images of the Western wilderness; Donald G. Pike provided the text. The book also reproduces earlier photographs by the pioneer Southwest photographer Adam Clark Vroman.
The subject
The Ancestral Puebloans—the "Anasazi" of the title—built the cliff dwellings and great houses of Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon, and Canyon de Chelly, then largely left the region around 1300. Modern archaeology and Pueblo communities now prefer "Ancestral Puebloans" to the Navajo-derived "Anasazi."
How it has aged
As a photographic evocation it endures; as archaeology it is dated, reflecting 1970s understanding and terminology. Read it for atmosphere and images rather than current scholarship.
For more context
Read alongside recent archaeological accounts of Chaco and the Pueblo peoples' own histories.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- David Muench (photographs) & Donald G. Pike
- Publisher
- American West Publishing
- Place of publication
- Palo Alto, California
- Year
- 1974
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- History
- Location
- Maine