Customer Reviews

House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest

5 star:		(39)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Craig Childs, who has spent a lifetime exploring the hidden corners of the American Southwest for even the faintest signs of water, adventure, and discovery in his previous books such as The Secret Knowledge of Water, Soul of Nowhere, and The Way Out, has turned his keen senses and ever inquisitive spirit in search of the secrets to what happened to the ancient Anasazi (or Ancestral Puebloans) of the region.

Through his reading of scholarly sources and history, seeking out of oral histories and traditions, and hundreds of miles of walking the landscape in search of clues, Craig Childs has turned his considerable talents for reading the landscape and turning his observations into wonderful prose towards the mystery of what happened to the Anasazi of 800 to 1000 years ago. He has canvassed the region, including Northern Mexico, to find out how this ancient civilization converged on places like Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde, where its culture thrived and flourished. And why these hubs of civilization dried up and its people seemingly scattered into the wind.

House of Rain isn't about finding definitive answers to the questions concerning these ancient peoples - the details we may never know; instead, this book is about the discovery and exploration of the mysteries of those who came before us on this land. We seek out these ancient civilizations because we hope, no we believe that through the journey of discovery we will find a piece of ourselves...and then maybe the answers we hope will help us in our future.

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A Guide to my Book Rating System:

1 star = The wood pulp would have been better utilized as toilet paper.
2 stars = Don't bother, clean your bathroom instead.
3 stars = Wasn't a waste of time, but it was time wasted.
4 stars = Good book, but not life altering.
5 stars = This book changed my world in at least some small way.

This is one of the best books written on the native peoples of the Southwest. Childs uses his travels, his inquisitiveness and imagination to write a plausable history of the Anasazi... tracing their exodus from Chaco and the Colorado Plateau south into Mexico. An academic could never leap to the conclusions that Childs postulates, however most archeological papers don't touch the soul. Child's book does. He brings the Anasazi back to life and paints their culture with a colorful brush. I'll never look at an Anasazi ruin in the same way again.

The fate of the "Anasazi" people is one of the Southwest's greatest mysteries. Scholars continue to debate what happened to wipe this culture from existence. Archaeological evidence points to a highly intelligent people who accomplished many great things over several centuries. So where did they go?

In HOUSE OF RAIN: TRACKING A VANISHED CIVILIZATION ACROSS THE AMERICAN SOUTHWEST, Craig Childs chronicles his studies of the lost Anasazi through exploration of ruins and pottery finds.

While this may sound dry at first glance, Childs succeeds at assembling his research and adventures into readable form. Part narrative and part scholarly writing, HOUSE OF RAIN is informative without being dull, which opens it to not only students in the field, but also to people genuinely interested in history and archaeology.

Although Childs's style in engaging, the constant transitions between stories of his on-site explorations and the offering of hard fact can be confusing. Childs frequently skips between memories of various digs, walking journeys, and times when he's been allowed access to artifacts and secluded sites. It's hard to keep track of where and when he's talking about when he skips around in this manner.

Aside from the mild confusion occasionally elicited by the scattered narrative, HOUSE OF RAIN has a great deal to offer history buffs. Readers' eyes will be opened by Childs's observations and depth of knowledge. There are no set answers, but he offers salient points that may go a long way to suggesting what really happened to the mysterious Anasazi.

Reviewed by Christina Wantz Fixemer
03/04/2007

Note that I did not say "disappearance."

That said, you don't need to read Craig Childs to tell you that. A number of good modern authors, not necessarily Ph.D. anthropologists, have been writing about that for going on a decade.

That then said, Childs book has a wider geographic and chronological spread than others of these books. Starting with the rise of Chaco Canyon, he takes us through Mesa Verde, Kayenta and the Mogollon Rim down into northeastern Sonora, and runs from around 1000 CE to first Spanish contact in Sonora and the start of written history.

He uses pottery, architecture, skeletal and skeletal DNA evidence to trace the movement of the Ancestral Puebloans (the best term, rather than either Anasazi or Hisatsinom) to across all these areas.

His thought provocation includes wondering what level of culture, religious observance, etc., these peoples had at different times and places in their history. Since his beat, as a layperson, tends more toward archaeology than anthropology, he doesn't get into these issues too much, but does stimulate thought.

That said, this book isn't five-star, or even quite four-star, for a few reasons.

I was going to four-star at first, but just couldn't quite pull the trigger, especially based on what this book could have been versus what it actually is.

1. The "personal happenings" anecdotes are longer, and contribute less to the flow of the narrative, than in, say, David Roberts in "In Search of the Old Ones."

2. Without revealing too much about site locations, Childs could at least have had a few general area maps in the book. Again, compare Roberts.

3. He didn't anything with tying in the Mimbres culture of SW New Mexico into his thesis; perhaps that's because it's lack of apparent Chacoan influence or connectedness upsets some of his ideas.

4. He gets a bit New Agey at times, especially in his chapter(s) on the Great Sage Plain. No thanks.

5. Finally, to the degree he focuses on pottery, the lack of color plate pages is just not acceptable.

It's been a long time since I was thoroughly captivated by a book but House Of Rain has managed to do just that. Craig Childs is arguably one of the finest non-fiction writers today. For those of us who live and breathe the Great Southwest, Child's descriptions will bring back vivid memories of Sleeping Ute mountain in the distance and standing where the Ancients stood at Mesa Verde, Hovenweep, and Chaco. For those reviewers who felt like they needed maps and an answer, you can get maps at the visitor centers all bound up in glossy little books with equally glossy descriptions of people and places. This is not one of those books - it's so much deeper. This book is not a souvenier, it's a vehicle that takes you to places that a relative few will ever see and even less will understand. Sometimes, there is no final answer - there's just the lingering questions. That's part of what makes it so interesting.

Craig Childs is an amazing writer. Each time I take up my copy of HOUSE OF RAIN I eagerly anticipate another view into the ancient Anasazi culture through Childs' eyes. HOUSE is Childs' personal record of his trek across the lands of the Anasazis. Childs is an attentive observer. He mainained a journal of his observations, his feelings, his speculations. HOUSE OF RAIN reads like a cleaned up edition of Childs' personal journals as he treks through arid arroyos or walks like "an angel of death" through a rare desert drenching downpour. His self-deprecating humor tickled my funny bone when Childs describes his dash across a suburban landscape in his boxer shorts, facing down two friendly and slobbering dogs. Childs' research leg work is extensive. Interjected aomng the details of his journey, Childs provides insights about the Anasazi world with startling finds by archaeologists, paleonlogists, geologists, physical surveyors, native peoples, and USA Park Service people. Childs' language and word images are as finely sculptured as the wind and water erroded desert landscape and arroyo walls. HOUSE OF RAIN is a must read book for students of paleo-America and tellers of American tales. Childs' greatest contribution may be that he affirms that the myserious ancient ruins spread across the US Southwest are more than tourist picture ops; rather they are remnants of real people grinding corn, doing house hold chores, laboring to build roads and places of worship, eking out a living in a hard land. In the end, Childs causes a readers to acknowledge that those ancient peoples are us.

Craig Childs and "House of Rain" took me to places I've been and most importantly, to places I've been unable to experience. As I was reading this descriptive narrative of the Southwest that I love so much, I felt I was walking right beside him...excellent!

Craig Childs has written the book I've been waiting for, and he's mostly done a damn good job of it. (Kinda wish I'd written it myself...!) The intense, intensive, and fascinating amount of research he conducted, primarily by tramping through the U.S. Southwest and the Mexican northwest, as well as meeting with highly-informed people all along the way who sometimes posited their own theories and stories, is revealed in a slow, leisurely manner--not unlike, one suspects, the manner of the eventual movement of the people he tracked. An unhurried, deeply appreciative perspective of the land is brought almost trancelike to the reader; like Childs, we are pulled into the rhythms of living and traveling within the dictates of the very geography that defined the culture(s) he studied.

I have lived in the Southwest since 1999 and have explored many a ruin myself. The absolute reverence he displays toward the remains of the people, their belongings, and their architecture is something I agree with, and I am pleased that he shares this respect in his book. Thank you, Mr. Childs, for further propagating the idea that these ancient artifacts are, if so desired, to be sought, admired, photographed, gingerly handled--and then left in place for either the next explorer or the winds and the sands. If only every explorer felt the same, there would be a heck of a lot more out there to see.

I wavered on appointing 4 or 5 stars. The reason is that I was distracted, during the first few hundred pages (yes, this is solid 445-page tome), by Childs' meandering reveries that did sometimes confuse as to who, what, where, and when. But by the time I was well in the 300s, I got over it and surrendered to the lazy style, as I realized that it was reminiscent of the places he was wandering. His writing style emulates, I believe, the pace of life he and others think the ancient ones might have led. Having lived and traveled extensively on that same land myself (primarily in Utah), I completely understand and concur.

For the serious buff, the neophyte archeologist, or the newbie to the scene of the Anasazi/ancestral Puebloans/ancient ones/pick your name, *House of Rain* is a well-detailed foray into that world. Colorful macaws, turkeys (the wild descendants of which still roam those areas), human sacrifice, war, peace, wildly intricate pottery, art, cannibalism, worshipping rain gods, culture clashes, the relativity of architecture and movement to the evolvement of the people--all those aspects, and more, fill Childs' pages. Far from a dry, academic treatment, this book allows the people and their culture to spring to life--even if some of it is still speculation.

Some of his theories are utterly gripping and cause the mind spin with possibilities (mine did, at least). And they make a lot of sense. Whether or not "science" will ever back him up remains to be seen--and, as one other reviewer said, archeologists don't generally allow much soul into their theories, do they? I'm all for a blending of the two: hard facts and imagination. Through that combination, the world has seen many an innovation or great discovery. Childs adds to those possibilities, magnificently so. This is a highly recommended read.

There is knowledge and substance to be gleaned from the land that can be had no other way than by walking it. And the land Craig Childs walks in this book is some of the most fascinating, particularly if your are bewitched by the ancient Anasazi culture and all that it left beind. His premise of tracking the movement of this culture by tracing its architecture, masonry, pottery, and other indicators as the people moved around and then south presents these prehistoric natives in a way that opened my eyes. The many miles the author spent with feet on the ground makes us all fantasize about doing the same, even though we can't or won't...or don't. There is much to be learned from this book, both about individual human endeavor and the culture that endeavor explores. Highly recommended.

Living near Four Corners country, I've often felt that the makers of Chaco are still a ghostly presence, haunting conversations, land use policies, wilderness... I think it's the overwhelming evidence that something big happened here, for hundreds of years, and that it's no longer happening. It's hard not to look around at the big things we're doing, and shiver; in the end, the desert always wins.

House of Rain is by far the best and most accessible book available for those interested in the Anasazi and Chaco Culture (and Craig explains why these are loaded and not necessarily helpful terms). An expert on the subject himself, with his own ideas, he humbly takes the reader on a tour of the evidence and other theories, and in some of the book's finest passages he literally travels in the footsteps of the migratory people responsible for the imposing ruins that still inspire awe around here.

As for the previous reviewer, the kindest assumption I can make is that she didn't get past the dust jacket. House of Rain is, in fact, the single best argument against the simplistic view of the Anasazi that she claims to be upset about. Perhaps she should, you know, give it a read.