ANCIENT WALLS: Indian Ruins of the Southwest...

ANCIENT WALLS: Indian Ruins of the Southwest by Chuck Place, with an interpretive text by Susan Lamb (Fulcrum: $19.95) and UNDERSTANDING THE ANASAZI OF MESA VERDE AND HOVENSWEEP edited by David Grant Noble (Ancient City Press, P.O. Box 5401, Santa Fe, N. M., 87502: $6.95, illustrated). The Anasazi (whose name comes from the Navajo word for ancient ones ) arrived in the Four Corners region of the American Southwest circa AD 600. They developed a sophisticated civilization, weaving baskets, making graceful black-and-white pottery, irrigating plots of corn, beans and squash and constructing splendid masonry buildings. About AD 1300, they abandoned their homes. Why they left and where they went remains a mystery. Chuck Place’s photographs of the Anasazi ruins glow with the golden light of the Southwestern desert. He skillfully captures the details of the petroglyphs, and his larger views show how the ruins blend with the surrounding sandstone cliffs and mesas: The Anasazi obviously appreciated the beauty of the region and sought to attune their dwellings to it. Unfortunately, Susan Lamb’s minimal text tells the reader very little about the people or the sites. In contrast, the volume edited by David Noble offers a series of detailed essays on the people who built the pueblos of the Mesa Verde region and their rediscovery in the late 19th Century.After their abandonment, the ruins lay undisturbed and forgotten until amateur archeologists began excavating them in the 1890s. These learned but never pedantic essays and black-and-white, archival photographs complement Place’s spectacular images.