Childs seems to prove that a southward migration of at least some Anasazis was very likely a real event. Through his trademark technique of stashing water, he is able to walk the desert, talking to people, looking, and - sure enough, in the Sierra Madre canyons - finding apparent Anasazi ruins with hundreds of the T-shaped doorways so emblematic of their structures on the Colorado Plateau. But for Childs, the most interesting Anasazi trail does not lead to today’s famous Pueblo villages in the United States, but ever southward - Mesa Verde to the southern end of Comb Wash Valley, then into the Kayenta and Antelope Mesa country of Arizona, and finally into Mexico and the Sierra Madre.

Though House of Rain is not interested in those lessons, we meet scores of archeologists in Childs’s treks across the Southwest, and he does engage the Hopis on several occasions in an effort to trace the Anasazi story. (This clear continuity is one reason why the Pueblos and most archeologists nowadays want to retire the word Anasazi in favor of the term Ancestral Puebloans.) In his 1999 book, Anasazi America, David Stuart argued that at Chaco a thousand years ago the ancestors of today’s Pueblo peoples made many of the same mistakes we are making in the contemporary United States, and in the aftermath of Chacoan collapse they learned two great lessons: to reduce their population drastically, to 25 percent of what it had once been, and to avoid the grossly unequal distribution of wealth and power that had eaten away at Chaco. They went on to become the Hopis, the Zunis, and the Puebloan villagers of the Rio Grande in New Mexico. After mostly abandoning their Chacoan civilization a thousand years ago, and later fleeing the sequel world they created around Mesa Verde because of droughts, warfare, and some very grisly violence in the 1200s, many of these people moved to permanent water sources elsewhere in the region. What happened to the Anasazi? Well, forty or fifty of them offered to sell me turquoise jewelry on the plaza in downtown Santa Fe just yesterday.Ĭraig Childs knows this, and in a few places in House of Rain he does mention that among archeologists there is no real conundrum about a vanished people here. Or perhaps it’s a riddle on a par with strolling through a city like Mérida, in the Yucatán, surrounded by tens of thousands of Mayan Indians, and looking over their heads to wonder what in the world happened to the people who built the pyramids of Chichén Itzá and Uxmal. But I was dubious about the premise of his new House of Rain, simply because for most of us enthralled with the Southwest the “mystery” of the “vanished Anasazi” is no mystery at all. No one writing about the American Southwest these days has wormed into the kernel of the place like Craig Childs, or been a biped across more of it.

House of Rain by Craig Childs