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Excerpt
The people who lived here a thousand years ago did look closely, at everything. Like the ancient Greeks, they wondered at what they saw, and peopled the earth with spirits to personify cause and effect, cloud and cornplant, sun and butterfly. They spoke to those spirits every day.
The pueblos were profoundly practical, built where no land suitable for farming would be wasted. Thick roofs held the meager heat inside in winter and insulated against the merciless sun in summer. The stone walls absorbed the low rays of late afternoon and the winter sun, to warm the rooms within. Some of the pueblos built in canyon alcoves had running water of a sort: a trickle of water percolating down through the bedrock. |
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Reviews If this book has a fault, it’s that it’s so intrinsically satisfying, you may not even feel you have to leave the comfort of your armchair to go exploring for yourself. —Family Travel Times Ancient Walls, composed of photographs by Chuck Place and text by Susan Lamb, captures in print an essential characteristic of the American Southwest, in respect to both the land and its ancient peoples. The authors’ finely crafted images and passionate descriptions convey the fundamental paradox of life in the deserts of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado: Enormously powerful forces of fire, water, air, and earth are relentless and inescapable, yet the life that endures seems impossibly fragile. … Chuck Place’ s photographs capture the contradictory character of the land and its ancient people—the delicate balance of strength and weakness that governs life. … Pick it off the bookstore shelf, thumb through it, and you will be struck by the high quality of the photographs and the elegant format in which they are presented. It is, however, much more than merely another slick coffee table decoration. Although most people will buy this book for its color-saturated, calendar-style photography, if they take the time to read the sensitively crafted text, they will discover another book. The images will then be transformed; what seemed merely pretty will become ironic. Beauty and tragedy become fused, and the reader may catch a glimpse of the sublime in the ruins of ancient people. —Don Hanlon No dusty relics of a dim past here, Ancient Walls is a vibrant photographic chronicle of the lives of the ancient peoples of the Southwest. … This splendid volume is both a treasure and a keepsake. —United Methodist Reporter In vivid reds and oranges, Place captures the clean, but intricate, lines of kivas, cliff dwellings, and pueblos, as well as petroglyphs and pottery. All of the photographs portray mute magnificence. … The ancient walls are all that is left of a culture …. Their voices echo once again as you turn these pages. —Steve Brock Ancient Walls, a glorious celebration of the southwest’s Indian Ruins from the camera of Chuck Place, just plain blew me away. Here are all the enchanted places seen through the eye of an eagle, a scorpion, a haunted historian. It’s all here—the lonely pictographs and petroglyphs on canyon walls, the doorways into deserted rooms, the red-grey walls and blind-eyed windows left standing though the hands which built them are long dust themselves. If you’ve been to these places and tried to capture their essence, here they are. If you’ve never seen them, this is the way they look, waiting … patiently, quietly waiting for something that will never return. —Marilis Hornidge Ancient Walls is a truly gorgeous book, a title that literally stuns the senses, offering us all of history at its very best. Spectacular.
—Al Ralston A magnificent book which not only is a collection of color photographs about the Southwest; but, a text which gives the reader insight into the culture, land forms and history of the enormous region of our country. —Earl Brown |
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Fulcrum Publishing – 16100 Table Mountain Parkway, Suite 300 – Golden, Colorado 80403
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Massive cliffs retreat from the weather,
exposing layers of other colors, different textures. Caves form where water seeping through bedrock emerges from canyon walls, dissolving the lime that cements their minerals together. Mudstones split along
planes of deposition. If you look closely at the golden bluffs, you see the sweeping lines of sand dunes fossilized eons ago.
Architecture mirrors society. Within the pueblos of the Southwest people shared everything: walls, water, and
protection from the elements. Many of the pueblos are massively constructed of stone and a prodigious amount of mud mortar, possible only with an exceptional level of cooperation among the builders.
Kivas, the religious rooms, are incorporated into the pueblos, to be a part of every day life.