Some 20 years ago, David Roberts and his wife discovered a stunning prehistoric woven basket hidden between two sandstone slabs on Utah’s Cedar Mesa. It was Roberts’ greatest find in 40 years of exploring the Southwest. Another visitor or even an anthropologist likely would have removed the basket to take it home or display it in a museum. But Roberts believes in the concept of an “outdoor museum,” leaving artifacts where they lie, so that others, too, can have the joy of discovery.
He never even picked up the basket. “To take the basket out of its hiding place,” he writes in “The Lost World of the Old Ones,” “would in all likelihood have damaged it.” In 2012, Roberts and his wife and a group of close friends returned to the site and found the basket intact.
Roberts won’t tell where the basket is. He made that mistake in an earlier book, “In Search of the Old Ones,” of describing an intact corrugated pot elsewhere on Cedar Mesa, and left so many clues to its location that hikers beat a path to it. A ranger told a friend of the author, “Tell Roberts to shut the [expletive] up.”
That is not exactly an order that Roberts takes to heart. He likes to quote an editor who told him, “If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth writing about.” And that is what Roberts has been doing since he published his first book, “The Mountain of My Fear,” nearly 50 years ago. For years, the author, who grew up in Boulder, wrote about mountain climbing in Alaska. But after his first jaunt into the back country of the Southwest in 1973, he turned to exploring the desert country.
Roberts is foremost a mountain climber, and the series of stories in “The Lost World of the Old Ones” involve his perilous climbs into ancient strongholds and granaries of Ancestral Puebloans (today’s politically correct term for Anasazi). It is also a look at the desecrations of ancient settlements, the ever-changing conclusions of experts and the dueling theories of archaeologists. This is a funny, witty and highly personal account, filled with flashbacks into previous explorations, conversations with experts and Roberts’ own beliefs and prejudices. The book is detailed and serious enough for experts but written in a narrative style that engages average readers.
He is skeptical of those experts. In a chapter on Range Creek, a rich field of ruins and artifacts near Green River, Utah, he tells of a rancher who preserved the land and its treasures for years before turning it over to the government, which sent archaeologists to rifle the sites. At one time, the rancher came across a skeleton and to preserve it, he covered it with a metate, a stone basin used for grinding corn. Later, a group of graduate students in archaeology explored the land and proclaimed they had discovered the ancients had covered their dead with corn grinders.
Roberts embraces the concept of living museums but understands the fallacy of leaving artifacts in place where they are at the mercy of pot hunters. He once discovered a series of sandstone steps covered with thousands of pottery shards, a site he dubbed Pottery Steps. On subsequent trips, he was unable to find the Pottery Steps and concluded someone had swept the shards into a garbage bag and stolen them, then upended the stones.
Removing the pottery and other artifacts from sites would preserve and protect them, but many would languish in the back rooms of museums. And those displayed in glass cases would lack a sense of time and place.
Author events
David Roberts will discuss and sign “The Lost World of the Old Ones: Discoveries in the Ancient Southwest” at 7 p.m. April 15 at Tattered Cover, 2526 E. Colfax Ave, 303-322-7727, ; and at 7:30 p.m. April 16 at Boulder Book Store, 1107 Pearl St., Boulder. Vouchers, $5, include at $5 coupon. 303-447-2074, .
NONFICTION: HISTORY
The Lost World of the Old Ones: Discoveries in the Ancient Southwest
by David Roberts (Norton)
