House of Rain

House of Rain by Craig Childs

Category: History (sort of) Grade: A-

Childs has really written three different books in putting House of Rain together. Two of them are implied in the book's subtitle - "Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest" - while the third is sort of a side effect.

The first book - the one that caused me to buy the biij - is about the Anasazi. For those of you who aren't up on your Native American history, the Anasazi were a civilization of cliff dwellers in the southwest -- southern Colorado and northern New Mexico/Arizona. Legend has it that, one day in the 15th century, the entire people just disappeared. Its been a major area of research by archaeologists in that part of the world. Its hard not to be stunned when you seen these incredible constructs. Probably the most well known is in Mesa Verde in southwest Colorado, but these amazing little cities, or at least their ruins, appear all over the place. Its not completely clear what the cliff dwellings were used for - living space, defensive installations, religious sites or, most likely, a combination of all the above. Childs, in this book, ends up talking to lots of prominent archaeologists, and gets many theories on the table of what happened. What comes out is a picture of a migratory people who moved back and forth across the landscape and, seemingly, ended up heading further and further south, mostly as a result of drought. It remains a mystery, but probably not the cut-and-dried "disappearance" that is the popular story.

The second book - the side-effect book - tells the story of the methods that the archaeologists use to do their research. In a lot of ways, this was the most interesting of the three books. Its amazing what can be gleaned (guessed?) by looking at the design and decoration of pottery. Practical stuff carries a very different message than ornamental (and, therefore, probably religious). By tracking, where pieces of pottery show up and when, archaeologists can get a pretty good picture of migration patterns of various peoples. Other techniques that I found especially interesting:

• by taking a core sample of wooden pillars and beams, scientists can analyze the rings from the source trees and use them to provide pretty good accuracy as to when the construction took place.
• in one of my favorites, scientists take advantage of the fact that isotopes in teeth are deposited as the teeth are created, but isotopes in bones turn over about once a decade. By using the teeth and bones found in ruins, scientists can identify where people were born (teeth) and where they migrated to (bones) - again providing a method for tracking migration

The third book actually turns out to be the most interesting. It's essentially Childs' journal as he walks the Southwest from Native site to site. His bio on the jacket lists him as a naturalist and adventurer and this definitely comes through in his narrative. He talks about following hunches and traces of water as he wanders through the wilderness sometimes going days or even weeks without other people. He talks about coming out of the wilderness in to pueblos or Mexican villages afters days of walking. His lyrical writing really makes you feel like you're going along with him. Some of the writing is just plain beautiful. I thought he was going to fall in to a common writer's trap at the end of the book when, in the fourth chapter from the end, he writes a perfect ending for the book. Like some, less than successful writers, I was disappointed that, after that perfect ending, he kept going. To my surprise, the ending of the next chapter was just as good as were the ends of the last two chapters.

If you have any interest in Native history, archeology, early civilizations or just good writing, this is a book you might enjoy.