Architecture of the Ancient Ones. - book review

Author: Dudley Gardner Photographer: Val Brinkerhoff Publisher: Gibbs Smith 80 pages, US $19.95 / CD $29.95

Dudley Gardner is an Associate Professor at Western Wyoming Community College and is co-author of Forgotten Frontier: A History of Wyoming Coal Mines. He lives in Rock Springs, Wyoming. Val Brinkerhoff is an Associate Professor of Photography at Brigham Young University, and his work has been featured in "Photo Life," "American Photographer," "Darkroom Photography" and many other journals.

This is not your typical photographic how-to book; rather, it's a book of information about the "Ancient Ones"--the Anasazi who lived, built, and developed an outstanding civilization in Chaco, Canyon de Chelly and what is now the Navajo National Monument land from the beginning of the present era to about 1300 AD. How they lived and grew as a culture is only now being explored and documented by anthropologists. The sites are in present-day Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah.

The text of this elegantly produced book outlines what is known about these ancient peoples. The photographs record stunningly the beauty and power of their buildings and decorations. The vivid red rock of the area, often seen in gigantic cliffs overhanging the brick and stone buildings, gives a strikingly monumental impact. At the same time, the intimacy of the dwellings, often beautifully decorated with petroglyphs, provides some sense of the aesthetic and emotional force of this lost world. The devotion of the "Ancient Ones" and their special relationship to the corn which was their main crop, can be seen in their ceremonies and in their sophisticated architecture of dwellings, storage units and irrigation. Their defensive architecture reveals the constant warfare that they underwent.

The beautiful, detailed photography enriches the book--not only is it emotionally powerful it itself, it aptly supplements the text to give us a real insight into this lost ancestral world.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Photographic Society of America, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group