In Craig Childs’ new book, “House of Rain,” Childs succeeds in translating a good hunk of Southwestern archaeology while providing us with the kind of inductive visceral experience Childs does better than any other naturalist. As in “The Secret Knowledge of Water,” in which we are treated to the insides of slot canyons before, during and after flooding, here we see the insides both of particular ruins and the mappings of the Ancestral Puebloan/Anasazi/Salado civilizations.
We get to see the land organized along ancient and deliberate meridians, tracking through time the tribulations of that civilization and one of its subsequent retreats and reorganizations southward.
Translating Southwestern archaeology for a lay audience is no mean feat, as anyone who has even remotely attempted to read academic and/or government treatises will tell you. In many ways the birthplace of American archaeology (the other being the Ohio and Mississippi drainages), the study of Southwestern prehistory is rife with heavily contested views, insecure scientists, painstaking minutiae (think potsherds and lithic debris) and/or grandiose scenarios (Aztecan elites, wide-ranging trade networks, etc.).
Most of this is written in tedious scientific style, dry as a bone and filled with terminology no Microsoft spell-check would ever recognize. Childs does a phenomenal job of portraying both the theories and their inventors in favorable lights, and the reader catches a glimpse of a hearty outdoor world filled with people obsessed with the puzzle of the past.
A hunger for cultural continuity
“House of Rain” is thus the prehistoric Southwest as a great many of its archaeological students see it, brought to earth by Childs’ dedicated explorations into the crevices, great and small, that reveal this world.
There are, however, some issues with the book, such as the fact that a novice reading it would never know that most Anasazi survivors live in New Mexico, not at Hopi or points south. Childs leaves the modern-day descendants of this civilization largely out of the picture, including Hopi visitations only a few times.
This must be deliberate, because Childs is too savvy a writer not to know that his “hunger,” as he calls it from the very beginning, isn’t in part the hunger of a white child whose own past has been culturally lost to him. It was never lost to the Hopi or other Puebloan peoples, and because he does not acknowledge this – just a brushstroke in the beginning would suffice – one can uncomfortably wonder if we’re not just participating in yet another adventure in armchair colonialism, whereby we educated white folk get to go on a pleasant and vicarious journey through a past (albeit with its own colonial intentions at times, it seems) not our own.
The larger issue, then, is Childs’ own motivation for writing this, a motivation that is more necessary when talking about ancient peoples than it is for exploring the hydrology, say, of the Grand Canyon.
“House of Rain” is the first of three books Childs plans to write on this subject. One can hope that the next book reveals more of Childs’ intentions with the fantastic and well-wrought material he has laid out here. It will only serve to deepen a terribly complex terrain that is not merely scientific and experiential, but profoundly spiritual as well.
Katharine Niles is a freelance writer in Durango.
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House of Rain
Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest
By Craig Childs
Little, Brown, 497 pages, $24.99
