At the height of their power in the late eleventh century, the Chaco Anasazi dominated a territory in the American Southwest larger than any European principality of the time. A vast and powerful alliance of thousands of farming hamlets and nearly 100 spectacular towns integrated the region through economic and religious ties, and the whole system was interconnected with hundreds of miles of roads. It took these Anasazi farmers more than seven centuries to lay the agricultural, organizational, and technological groundwork for the creation of classic Chacoan civilization, which lasted about 200 yearsonly to collapse spectacularly in a mere 40.

Why did such a great society collapse? Who survived? Why? In this lively book anthropologist/archaeologist David Stuart presents answers to these questions that offer useful lessons to modern societies. His account of the rise and fall of the Chaco Anasazi brings to life the people known to us today as the architects of Chaco Canyon, the spectacular national park in New Mexico that thousands of tourists visit every year. Chacos failure, Stuart argues, was a failure to adapt to the consequences of rapid growth. Foremost among Chacoans problems were misuse of farmland, malnutrition, loss of community, and inability to deal with climatic catastrophe. The descendants of the Anasazi, the Pueblo Indians of the Southwest, adapted strategically to minimize the impact of these problems. Stuart sees the contrasting fates of the Anasazi and their Pueblo descendants as a parable for modern societies.

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Roberts describes the culture of the Anasazi--the name means "enemy ancestors" in Navajo--who once inhabited the Colorado Plateau and whose modern descendants are the Hopi Indians of Arizona. Archaeologists, Roberts writes, have been puzzling over the Anasazi for more than a century, trying to determine the environmental and cultural stresses that caused their society to collapse 700 years ago. He guides us through controversies in the historical record, among them the haunting question of whether the Anasazi committed acts of cannibalism. Roberts's book is full of up-to-date thinking on the culture of the ancient people who lived in the harsh desert country of the Southwest.

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More than a thousand years ago, a people known as the Anasazi lived in the North American Southwest. They produced pottery, baskets, and cloth, and engaged in trade. They were master builders and erected magnificent structures. Then in the last half of the thirteenth century, something mysterious happened. The Anasazi walked away from their world and vanished into history. But why?

One place to look for clues is in northwestern New Mexico, among the ruins of Chaco Canyon. The discovery of a network of roads leading to the canyon have led some archaeologists to believe that this may have been the very center of the Anasazi universe. But what drew them to this hot, dry canyon?

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Anasazi Architecture and American Design is a journey through Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde with leading southwestern archaeologists, historians, architects, landscape architects, artists, and urban planners as guides. In sixteen chapters, the volume's twenty-two essayists identify Anasazi building and cultural features related to design and site planning, cosmography, mythology, and ecology, then expertly balance their observations of past architectural and cultural achievements with suggestions and recommendations for design practices in the present.

Among the contributors are Santa Clara Pueblo architectural theorist Rina Swentzell; architects Tony Anella and Stephen Schreiber; historian Richard Ellis; art historian J. J. Brody; archaeologists Stephen Lekson, David Stuart, Michael Marshall, John Stein, and Dabney Ford; urban planners Theodore Jojola, Judith Suiter, Stephen Dent, Barbara Coleman, and Paul Lusk; and artist Anna Sofaer, founder of the Solstice Project.

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Since the 1960s, large-scale cultural resource management projects have revealed the former presence of extensive and varied Basketmaker III populations across the entire northern Southwest. These discoveries have resulted in a greatly expanded view of the BMIII period (A.D. 550-750) which immediately proceeds the Pueblo phase. Particularly noteworthy are findings of Basketmaker remains under those of later periods and in sites with open settings, as opposed to the more classic Basketmaker cave and rock shelter sites. Foundations of Anasazi Culture explores this new evidence in search of further understanding of Anasazi development. Several chapters address the BMII-BMIII transition, including the initial production and use of pottery, greater reliance on agriculture, and the construction of increasingly elaborate structures. Other chapters move beyond the transitional period to discuss key elements of the Anasazi lifeway, including the use of gray-, red-, and white-ware ceramics, pir structures, storage cists, surface rooms, full dependence on agriculture, and varying degrees of social specialization and differentiation. A number of contributions address one or more of these issues as they occur at specific sites. Other contributors consider the material culture of the period in terms of common elements in architecture, ceramics, lithic technology, and decorative media. This major synthesis of recent work on BMIII sites on the Colorado Plateau will be useful to anyone with an interest in the earliest days of Anasazi civilization.

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Chaco Canyon was a central place in the Ancient Southwest. Here, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, architects and masons constructed a dozen “great houses” made of formal masonry construction with as many as 650 rooms massed up to five stories high.

Research in recent years suggests that Chaco appears to have represented a form of regional organization that existed across much of the Colorado Plateau between A.D. 900 and 1200. This collection provides detailed analysis of the nature of Anasazi social organization. This updated version includes a chapter “Chaco Update 2000” which addresses research on Chaco settlements since the original publication of this volume in 1992.

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Discusses the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde, Colorado, and what is known about the history and culture of the Anasazi Indians who lived in them.

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