Cliffs of red sandstone form the canyon the Navajo call Tseyi (meaning in the rock) in Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Arizona. Ruins of elaborate stone villages tucked into cliff-side alcoves testify to a thousand years of habitation by the ancestral Puebloan Indians. Today, the canyon is home to the Navajo, as it has been for centuries. One of the most popular and dramatic sites in the Southwest, Canyon de Chelly helps preserve both the ancient history of the ancestral Puebloan and the contemporary culture of the Navajo.

Canyon de Chelly is a labyrinth of sheer-walled canyons, spectacular in their beauty and enthralling in their history. Now home to the Navajo, Canyon de Chelly once harbored the mystery-shrouded culture of the Anasazi--ancient people of the canyon's many ruins. Canyon de Chelly National Monument, located in northeastrn Arizona, first set aside in 1931, preserves ancient canyon wall caves and ruins of Indian villages built between A.D. 350 and 1300.

The Navajo people of Canyon de Chelly must negotiate a delicate balance between the old and the new as they struggle to maintain their traditional ways of life in the midst of archaeologists, U.S. Park Service employees, and the increasing numbers of tourists who come to visit this hauntingly beautiful part of northeastern Arizona. Anthropologist-writer Jeanne Simonelli, who worked at Canyon de Chelly as a seasonal park ranger, interweaves stories of her personal experiences and friendships with canyon residents with discussions of native history and culture in the region. Focusing on the members of one extended Navajo family, Simonelli describes the small moments of their daily lives: shearing goats, baking bread, attending a solemn all-night health ceremony, washing clothes at the local laundromat, playing traditional games and contemporary sports, talking about the history of the Dinthe Navajo peopleand pondering the changes they have witnessed in the canyon and the difficulties they confront. Crossing Between Worlds is sumptuously illustrated with insightful black-and-white photographs that document the everyday activities of Navajo families in one of the most spectacular corners of the American Southwest.

With the exception of the Grand Canyon itself, none of the great gorges of the American Southwest is more uniquely beautiful than Canyon de Chelly, with its sheer red cliffs and innumerable prehistoric Indian dwellings. Of all the important centers of prehistoric Anasazi culture, only this magnificent canyon shows an unbroken record of settlement for more than 1,000 years. In this liberally illustrated book, rock art authority Campbell Grant examines four aspects of the spectacular canyon: its physical characteristics, its history of human habitation, its explorers and archaeologists, and its countless rock paintings and petroglyphs. Grant surveys 96 sites in the two main canyons and offers an interpretation of the rock art found there.