Examines specific issues about the history and lifeways of the prehistoric inhabitants in and around Glen Canyon (Utah and Arizona), and presents an updated version of regional culture history 30 years after the end of the massive archaeological study conducted prior to the creation of Lake Powell (the Glen Canyon Project). Contains cultural and historical information dealing with the archaic period, the beginnings of agricultural economies, and the Formative period and cultures. Discusses archaic diet, slab lined hearths, hunter-gatherer mobility, Fremont pottery, and a description of a Pueblo III community.

"Focusing on the saddening, maddening example of Glen Canyon, Jared Farmer traces the history of exploration and development in the Four Corners region, discusses the role of tourism in changing the face of the West, and shows how the "invention" of Lake Powell has served multiple needs. He also seeks to identify the point at which change becomes loss: How do people deal with losing places they love? How are we to remember or restore lost places?"--BOOK JACKET.

Stretching for 170 miles across northern Arizona and southern Utah, Lake Powell is both a vacationer's paradise and the second-largest reservoir in the Western Hemisphere. Yet few visitors to the lake today are aware of the lost world that lies beneath its crystal waters. Once an enchanted landscape of sandstone cliffs and secret crevices, Glen Canyon has been but a memory since the damming of the Colorado River near Page, Arizona, in 1963. Often called "the place no one knew," Glen Canyon was in fact explored by thousands of visitors—including dozens of writers—before the dam's completion. River runner Mathew Gross has combed the literature of Glen Canyon to assemble this wide-ranging look at the history of this now-submerged natural treasure, the first book to bring together these voices of remembrance. Beginning with the first known written report of Glen Canyon in an eighteenth-century missionary journal, Gross has selected accounts of the canyon from both before and after the dam. Included are some of the West's best-known writers—Zane Grey and Katie Lee, Edward Abbey and Ellen Meloy—as well as Pulitzer Prize winners John McPhee and Wallace Stegner. Other authors range from David Brower, director of the Sierra Club when the dam was built, to Floyd Dominy, the federal bureaucrat responsible for the dam. The Glen Canyon Reader is a book that may be read straight through as entertaining and informative history. But as Gross suggests, "Perhaps more pleasurable is to flip through these pages, to poke around and explore, as one would have done in Glen Canyon . . . to visit and revisit the places contained in this book, these cool glens and embracing alcoves and hidden grottos, these canyons and dreams and ghosts that will always, always be with us."

Presents the results of the five-year operation to inventory the archaeology, geology, history, and ecology of Glen Canyon and its tributaries before they were submerged beneath Lake Powell.

Chaco Canyon, the great Ancestral Pueblo site of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, remains a central problem of Southwestern archaeology. Chaco, with its monumental “great houses,” was the center of a vast region marked by “outlier” great houses. The canyon itself has been investigated for over a century, but only a few of the more than 200 outlier great houses—key to understanding Chaco and its times—have been excavated. This volume explores the Chaco and post-Chaco eras in the northern San Juan area through extensive excavations at the Bluff Great House, a major Chaco “outlier” in Utah. Bluff’s massive great house, great kiva, and earthen berms are described and compared to other great houses in the northern Chaco region. Those assessments support intriguing new ideas about the Chaco region and the effect of the collapse of Chaco Canyon on “outlying” great houses. New insights from the Bluff Great House clarify the construction and use of great houses during the Chaco era and trace the history of great houses in the generations after Chaco’s decline. An innovative comparative study of the northern and southern portions of the Chaco world (the northern San Juan area around Bluff and the Cibola area around Zuni) leads to new ideas about population aggregation and regional abandonment in the Southwest. Appendixes present details and descriptions of artifacts recovered from Bluff: ceramics, projectile points, pollen analyses, faunal remains, bone tools, ornaments, and more. This book is one of only a handful of reports on Chacoan great houses in the northern San Juan region. It provides an in-depth study of the Chaco era and clarifies the relationship of “outlying” great houses to Chaco Canyon. Research at the Bluff Great House begins to answer key questions about the nature of Chaco and its region, and the history of the northern San Juan in the Chaco and post-Chaco worlds.