Word: anasazi
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...North America A no-frills yucca-fiber model from the Anasazi...
Begin your journey at the Raven Site Ruin, one of the few archaeological digs where you don't have to be an archaeologist to dig in. Located near Springerville (about four hours east of Phoenix), the prehistoric site was a pottery-manufacturing center occupied by the Anasazi and Mogollon Indians until it was abandoned some 600 years ago. These days the site offers hands-on excavation programs that last from one day to one week (children must be at least nine years of age). Mornings are spent digging with trained archaeologists; afternoons include hikes to nearby petroglyphs (ancient rock drawings...
...result, Legends of the American Desert (Knopf; 534 pages; $30) is a fascinating and sometimes bewildering profusion of themes that appear, join, separate and disappear like the braided channels of a Southwestern river. It is also an impressive exercise in graceful journalism. Chapters on the Anasazi and Havasupai tribes, for instance, and the Jesuits and Franciscans, don't read like potted histories ploddingly typed from a writer's file cards. There's no dust in this desert history. Colonizers and colonized live in the author's mind; ideas about them boil up, and off he goes in pursuit...
Anyone who has been to southern Utah knows the unique beauty of the land. Millions of years of wind and running water have carved deep canyons in the soft sandstone--from thin "slot" canyons 10 feet wide but more than 1,000 feet high, to the magnificent Grand Canyon. Anasazi Indian ruins hide in the sandstone depths. Many species of endangered wildlife live in this wilderness. When the sun sets, the mesas glow fuchsia, gold, violet...
...prize of the collection is a haunting story called The Runner, in which an ordinary man tries earnestly to bridge the spiritual distance between himself and his long-absent sister, legendary in Arizona for making all but impossible runs over ancient, barely visible Anasazi trails in the Grand Canyon. Her descents are a kind of Zen archery, only partly physical. Lopez, who's far too shrewd to bring the fey sister onstage, leaves the reader with a mysterious image: the woman, running on her toes like a deer, glimpsed by rafting vacationers, and then, downriver beyond impassible rock walls, glimpsed...