Craig Childs

I never knew I was a sucker for the Ice Age until I saw a fabulous exhibit on it at the Cincinnati Museum Center a few years back. This is the book I've been wanting to read ever since, and it hit all the right buttons. I love Childs' hazy retreat into history after discussing archaeological digs and camping trips, bringing the past to life. I now have an even greater appreciation for the world that came before ours and will look at the land in a whole new way.

This book is a pleasing blend of science, history, and memoir. As I read it, I felt like I was accompanying author Craig Childs back into prehistory. He traces the arrival of the first humans in North America and describes artifacts that tell how they lived and died. Childs travels to various archaeological sites, covering a wide swath of North America, with stops in Canada and the US, including Alaska, Oregon, New Mexico, Texas, Nevada, Florida, and more.

The book is structured in a loosely show more chronological order, from approximately 40,000 to 10,000 years ago. He investigates discoveries of the bones of mastodons, dire wolves, giant bears, mammoths, bison, lions, and sabertooth cats. He looks at the evidence of tools, plants, and diets. He includes interviews with selected scientists who provide expert viewpoints on dates, migrations, and lifestyles of these ancient people.

This book is right up my alley. One of the aspects I liked the best is the personable way these potentially dry topics are covered. The author has made it into a travelogue of sorts. He describes his traveling companions, and what they saw and did at the various sites they visited. This book examines so many fascinating topics, such as archaeology, anthropology, paleontology, ecology, geology, and geography. I you like to read about one or more of these, it is a wonderfully entertaining glimpse into the a past era.

4.5 show less

Author Craig Childs is perhaps best described as a “naturalist”, although his education is in journalism and “desert studies”. This is the first book of his I’ve read, and I found it absorbing. I’ve always been skeptical about journalists writing on science; they have tendencies to sensationalize, to base narratives on interviews rather than data, and to selling a particular story rather than exploring all the evidence. Childs avoids most these problems; there are no sensational show more discoveries, just patient and methodical archaeological work; there are interviews but they’re there to give archaeologists a chance to present data; and although Childs has a particular story he prefers, he gives space and references to archaeologists with other theories.

Childs is looking at the “mystery” of the Anasazi; the people who built at Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde and numerous other sites in the Southwest, then apparently disappeared. He systematically explores sites in the Southwest – sometimes alone, sometimes with archaeologists or other scientists. In a particularly impressive accomplishment, Childs hikes the Great North Road (after first caching water along it) while discussing its archaeological significance.

The back cover blurb describes the book as a “historical detective story” and there’s certainly some feel of that, but this isn’t a mystery novel where the master detective ties up all the loose ends in a magisterial dénouement. Instead Childs gathers bits and pieces of evidence and discusses how they might be significant.

Childs is sensitive to the native people he encounters but not obsequiously so. He apologizes to a Hopi archaeologist for using the term “Anasazi”; it’s a Navajo word and the Hopi prefer “Hisatsinom” or “Ancestral Puebloan”. He doesn’t tiptoe around evidence for gruesome violence – torture, cannibalism, and mass murder of children by burning alive – while noting that this raises hackles in natives: no one wants to believe their ancestors did these things.

I was particularly interested in Child’s use of the term “tethered nomadism”. He notes that although archaeologists have “restored” many of the sites – Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon, for example – research has found that the sites were “living” entities; rooms were continuously being demolished, rebuilt, filled with rubbish, emptied out again, and put to different purposes. Thus no particular “restoration” represents the site at any particular time. Sometimes an entire site was abandoned, only to be reoccupied years to decades later, suggesting the occupants had moved elsewhere for better farming or defense, then returned.

The is a smooth and easy read, simultaneously scholarly and personal. Relevant illustrations, a good glossary, and an extensive bibliography. Enthusiastically recommended to anyone interested in the archaeology of the North American southwest. I’ll definitely have to pick up Child’s other books. show less

I'm from the East Coast and it's difficult to find many places that invoke the feeling of 15,000 years ago, the forests are second growth and development is everywhere. But out west there are many places where one can easily collapse time and imagine little has changed other than being hotter and drier. The caves and stone dwellings still exist in a mostly intact landscape. This sense of time travel is what Craig Childs conveys as he tours archaeological sites around the Americas North, show more Central and South, but mainly focused on the United States west and Alaska.

The book has a ghostly poetic quality, we live among the bones of people and animals of a former world. It is deeply informative hardly a page goes by without some new interesting fact or perspective. Humans could have traveled from Alaska to Chile in as little as 2 years the speed of modern kayaks, easily living off the abundance of the "kelp highway" that reaches all the way to Japan. Humans have been in the Americas since at least 15,000 BC but likely longer with some evidence pushing it back to 30,000 BC - some of the oldest artifacts have been found on the US East Coast such as in the Chesapeake Bay.

Childs is of that generation that loves the primitive taking it to the level of spiritualism - he often speaks of ancient memories invoked by a place. Maybe he is right. or he might be a little insane too, in a good way. He ends with a trip to Black Rock desert home of Burning Man the ultimate neo-primitive collective. Only to find he wants to escape into the desert back in time, but not too far back when huge predators still walked about, rather to a sweet spot about 10,000 years ago when humans transitioned from eating Mammoths to deer and rabbits. show less