Stories and Stone: Writing from the Ancestral Pueblo Homeland (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004; $19.95), edited by Reuben Ellis, is a quirky, ruminative collection of essays, stories, travelogues, and poems from four centuries of visitors to the archaeological remains of the Anasazi in the Four Corners region. In an excerpt from a Willa Cather novel, a woman uses her thumb to dislodge "flakes of carbon from the rock roof--the cooking smoke of the Ancient People"; in a passage from the sixteenth-century Coronado Expedition, Pedro de Castaneda notes that one house "had been built by a civilized and warlike race of strangers...." Native writers form a big part of the collection.
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