of people who had been there and i was there with a navajo guy that i know who just was creeped out by this. because there's a certain heavy taboo in navaho culture about death and he said after we left this cliff dwelling, he said, i need a ceremony. too much death. you can't touch that much death, he said. but i'm from a different culture where we roll around in death, where we fill museums with death. this skull is from about a 5-year-old. and i found it because i thought it was a goerd. i saw the back side of it and it still had scalp on it and i thought, oh, a whole goerd. i reached down and picked it up and turned it around and had this face looking at me, which

is a very odd thing. maybe i need a ceremony. these routes that i am following have led me all over the place. the one i am about to tell you about didn't actually occur in house of rain. house of rain was getting too large, too many stories, but i was looking at how shells get traded. there are shell trade routes all over the southwest. shell was a primary material for making jewelry, for using in burials, and you had to walk 600 miles to get it, down to the sea of cortez, the water that's in between baja and the main land of mexico. and i tracked routes all the way down to the border over years and then across the mexican border into sonora and then it a place called penacate and then a dune, 5,000 square

miles of sand dunes, a beautiful landscape, but no water out there. but pottery, broken pottery all over in certain places and pieces of shell left behind where you could see that the people were crossing these dunes to the sea and picking up shell and then crossing back and then moving it up to phoenix and then from phoenix distributing it throughout the rest of the southwest. the first trip i took out there, we hit this mountain range right at the edge of the dunes. and we were carrying, i don't know, on that trip we were maybe carrying 80 or 90 pounds of water and moving it out to the sand and then we'd drop a cache and then go back and get more water and drop a cache. we were trying to get to the sea of cortez, that was one of the things on our mind, but this landscape, it starts

turning your mind inward or outward or it gets hard to tell which way it turns it because it's a psychological place. there's no end to your horizons. the sky is infinite, the sand is infinite. it's hard to keep your focus because you are constantly using peripheral vision looking all around you. it doesn't matter which way you walk after a while, you are just wandering. and so on the first trip out there, we didn't get to the sea because we just ended up wandering. it happens out there. you have a plan but the landscape becomes beautiful in a way that you weren't expecting and you start disappearing into it. you start forgetting why you are going in one direction. you start thinking, no, i just want to see that shadow over there and spend time there and then i want to see the next shadow and the next. it took 3 trips actually before we got to the sea. and all over at the edges of

the dunes and sometimes even out in the middle of the dunes where you get into a deep hole, you will find a broken ceramic ojalla, you will find a sea shell that somebody carried in there, you will pick up the shell going what were you doing out here, why were you walking in this place, were you seeing it the same way i'm seeing it? were you floating like a ghost or were you trudging and swimming and dragging yourself? what were you doing out here? on the last trip out, we did a lot of night walking. and we walked barefoot for the most part because it's much easier than walking in boots and it's just nice to walk barefoot for days and days at a time. on that trip in particular there were a lot of sidewinders out in the dunes which made for

an interesting element because the previous trip there had been snakes but not so many. you would wake up in the morning and there would be these elegant sidewinder tracks everywhere. the guy who dropped us off has the proclivity for picking up dangerous animals. i don't recommend it. it was kind of a terrifying experience to have somebody pick up a rattlesnake and go look at it, look at it, and put it right in your face and you are going, no, no, no thanks especially when he was the one driving around and leaving you out there to walk barefoot across the sand. out there where at times you are carrying 100 pounds of water, where you are carrying water in your hands, you are carrying water on your back, everything is about waterity there. you bury your water, you pick up your water, you strap it to your body. i remember on one of the trips carrying all this weight on my back and not sure why i had all

this weight on my back. it was making me so clumsy, it was dragging me around and i started trying to unclip it and unbuckle all this stuff that i was carrying out on the dunes so i could get rid of it finally until i realized, wow, you have really put a lot of buckles on this. you didn't want this stuff off you. it's water. don't drop your water. keep carrying it. drink it. this landscape is all about water. and on the last trip you can see the sea of cortez out there on the horizon. we walked to the edge of the dunes and even out there, just past the edge of the dunes, you would find places where there's -- there were piles of pottery, pottery scattered in the sand, and then the desert pan extended out and then you reach the sea of cortez that lies

beyond. you know, i should -- i want to show you guys these next slides. i'm kind of running out of time here but i've got to show you this place. i'm not going to go into heavy detail, i want to take you down here into the sierra madre. i was following routes all over for the house of rain, trying to figure out where the anastazi went when they left house of rain. many of them made the modern pueblos but other groups continued south. i followed pottery trails down into the sierra madre where my wife and two others went out and we came to these cliff dwellings. it seemed like every single cave we looked into had cliff dwellings. and this wasn't a place with trails. this wasn't a known location. many of these sites were

pristine. they were just -- it looked as if people had just left suddenly, just like all the stories in here. little cliff dwellings, little granaries, little sites falling apart. larger sites. this site went actually 5 layers deep into this cave. very particular to this region were these shaped storage rooms. this one is about 10 feet high. often they would have door stones sealing them on the top. and they were of all kinds of shapes and sizes, but they specific to that area. that's the smallest one we

found. and then this is the largest one, about 15 feet tall. now, where these have fallen over, they have broken open and you can see that they were just full of material. there's a woven mat right up there that's fallen out of that one. these sites were just covered with corn cobs where we'd go in and find a cache of corn cobs about 4 feet deep and 12 feet long, thousands and thousands of corn cobs and woven material all over the place, pieces of basketry, pieces of their sandals. this place is very well preserved. i mean a lot of this stuff is obviously worn, but it's been sitting there for 500 years. and what i found there that was

very specific to anastazi were t-shaped doorways. you can see a large t-shape here. this is a very specific symbol that you see in chaco canyon and you see in mesa verde. there are certain sites where they are finding t-shaped alters where pieces of stone about this size had been cut into t's and are standing up inside of rooms just covered with objects, with necklaces. so the shape obviously had some meaning. but it is a clear anastazi shape. it is a clear shape from the colorado plateau. we do see it in calinke, you see it in certain incan sites in south america. so it might be a pan american feature. i'm not sure what it is. some hopi people have told me that the t, the bottom of the

t, goes down into a mythical underground lake so this is an upside down mountain that leads down into a place called the house of rain. that is where twyla, probably oldest american deity, the rain deity, lives down in the house of rain and this is a t shape from up on the colorado plateau and that is the last picture on these slides, so -- the t shape, the pottery, i followed genetic information that you find in bones and teeth. i followed as many different pieces of information as i could and they sent me walking. i started in chaco canyon and walked north up to mesa verde, around to comb ridge in utah, down into the hopi mesa, across the mugion rim, to mexico and

then into the sierra madre, following people, following routes. because everything in the desert leaves a route that leads you somewhere. everything out there is a story. and that's what i'm following, these stories, looking for ways, looking for grains of sand out of place, looking for stories out in the middle of nowhere. i can open this up for questions if anybody has any questions. . >> i was wondering if they had any sort of metal or did they use hardened rocks of some sort to shape their stones? . >> most of what they did was stone. metallurgy was just starting to move up into northern chijuajua at that time and they were working with copper.

that was just ornamental, so there was no metal going on at all other than imported bells. >> and the shells, they went down to cortez -- not lake -- the cortez sea to get, was that mostly hard or brittle? . >> it was hard but not tool hard. the colorado plateau is covered with chert, a glassy rock that is really really good for making tools, making very sharp edges. you find there are pieces of chert all over the place and you can still cut your skin open very quickly with it and it's been sitting out in the open. >> where does chert come from? . >> it's a marine rock that's mostly silica. you find it in these layers, sandstone layers. if you are especially in a marine or water environment, you will find this layer of

chert. it's in all colors, purple, green, red, blue. it's a beautiful rock. . >> one thing i wanted to ask you, the review in the paper recently on sunday said that your book is different from all the other books about the anastazi because you brought out some of the non-flattering parts of their culture like violence. how did you conclude that they were a violent culture? . >> well, i didn't necessarily conclude they were a violent culture, i just concluded there was violence in their culture. the evidence is very clear where you find masker sites, where every place you drop a trench there are bodies, unburied bodies missing their heads, in some cases where there will be a head in one room and you can match it up to the body which is in another

room 100 yards away and they didn't just end up there; somebody took the head off. and there will be places where it's all femurs, all gathered together. and places where it's obviously some kind of warfare event where people are all huddled into one spot and they have all been burned there. the record is very clear of some intense violence and it comes up at a very certain point in time. it comes up in the 10th century right before large migrations you see this layer of violence. and it doesn't cover everything. sometimes a series of pueblos will all be destroyed over here and then a series of pueblos over here are in perfect condition as far as the walls aren't broken down, there aren't bodies all over the place. it looks like the place was left very peacefully or

ceremoniously where you can see they left artifacts out. different people had different ends but you can see where different people had unfortunate ends. i don't want to get into the details, it's in the book, but fairly grisly evidence. there are pockets of violence. these were human beings. some of the anastazi were beautiful, wise, balanced with the earth people and it's like, no, they were us, doing their neolithic stone age thing but still us, human beings living in a place, chopping each other into little pieces sometimes and living lives of prosperity at other times. >> we have time for one more

question. >> was the global warming when they were (inaudible) greenland and a cathedral there and i believe the maya moved from the lowlands to the highlands and the anastazi came down to the salt river. >> yeah, a lot of the movement was based on climate. the anastazi were always moving. the whole thing about the disappearing anastazi, you go to where they are living and they disappear all of a sudden. but you follow them and find, oh, 10 years later they are over here and 70 years later they are over here. they are often being driven by these climate changes which on the colorado plateau, very small changes make you go. if you lose one inch of precipitation in one year, you got to get up to the mesas where there's a little more rain and then when the frost

comes in too early, you got to get down to the desert. around 1276 or so the water was running out, the seasons were no good, and i think they just looked at their trade routes and said let's follow these and go south. they were always getting pushed around by the environment. . >> okay, thank you, craig, so much. thank you for coming. craig is happy to take some more informal questions in back and of course his book, house of rain, is available for sale in back too. thank you so much and thank you, craig childs. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * >> welcome to culture wire. we will look at the latest and greatest public art project. recently, the airport unveiled the new state of the art terminal. let's take a look. the new terminal service and american airlines and virgin america was designed by a world- renowned architecture's firm. originally built in 1954, the building underwent massive renovation to become the first registered terminal and one of

the must modern and sustainable terminals and the united states. the public art program continues its 30-year legacy of integrating art into the airport environment with the addition of five new commissions that are as bold and dynamic as the new building. >> this project was completed in record time, and we were able to integrate the artist's early enough in the process that they could work with the architect said that the work that is completed is the work that really helps complement and instill the space as opposed to being tucked away in a corner. >> be experience begins with the glass facades that was designed with over 120 laminated glass panels. it captures the experience of being under or over clouds when

flying in a plane. depending on the distance or point of view, it can appear clear for more abstract and atmospheric. the subtle colors change gradually depending on the light and the time of day. >> i wanted to create an art work that looks over time as well as working on in the first glance. the first time you come here, you may not see a. but you may be able to see one side over the other. it features a couple of suspended sculptures. each was created out of a series of flat plains run parallel to each other and constructed of steel tubing. >> it is made up of these strata. as the light starts to shift, there is a real sense that there is a dynamism.

>> it gives the illusion that this cultures might be fragments of a larger, mysterious mass. >> the environmental artwork livens it with color, light, and the movement. three large woven soldiers are suspended. these are activated by custom air flow program. >> i channeled air flow into each of these forms that makes it move ever so slightly. and it is beating like a heart. if-0 when as of the forces of nature moving around us every second. >> shadow patterns reflect the shapes of the hanging sculptures.

the new terminal also features a children's play areas. both of the market the exploratory n.y. -- exploratorium. the offer travelers of all ages a playful oasis. using high quality plywood, they created henches shaped like a bird wings that double as musical instruments. serving as a backdrop is a mural featuring images of local birds and san francisco's famous skyline. >> in the line between that is so natural, you can see birds and be in complete wilderness. i really like that about this. you could maybe get a little

snapshot of what they are expecting. >> it is an interactive, keck sculpture that is interacted with by the visitor. >> they are a lot about and they fall down the belt. it moves the belt up, and if you turn that faster, the butterflies fall in the move of words. >> the art reflect the commission's commitment to acquiring the best work from the bay area and beyond. in addition to the five new commissions, 20 artworks that were already in the airport collection were reinstalled. some of which were historically cited in the terminal. it includes major sculptures by the international artists. as a collection, these art works tell the story of the vibrant

arts scene in the early 1960's through the mid-1980s's. the illustrate san francisco's cultural center and a place of innovation that is recognized and the love throughout the world. one of the highlights is a series of three left tapestries. they are on view after being in storage for 20 years. these tapestries representing various gardens. from his years of living in san francisco. hydrangeas, chrysanthemums, and whilst dahlias in rich, deep shades as they make their way to the baggage area. they can access behind-the- scenes information and interviews with the artist through an audio to work.

it features archival audio as well as interviews with living artists. he can be accessed on site by dialing the telephone numbers located near the artwork or by visiting the commission's web site. the public art speaks volumes of san francisco as a world-class city with world-class art and culture. for more information, visit

. >> thank you and thank you to all of you for being here today in such a fantastic day, beautiful, sunny bay area. also i want to thank you, hilary flynn, the director of the irish festival for this invitation. let's celebrate the irish in the americas. i put a title to my conversation with you today,

take the journey with me, and i wanted to read you an irish proverb that i like it very much because it's the way the history of myself, the history of my family. the longest road out is the shortest road home. and so travel with me and let's go to havana, cuba, and to know a little bit about the irish, the few irish that went to cuba, in particular to havana. i want you to know that on the left side of the entrance to the havana harbor, there is a well-known fortress, el moro. there is a lighthouse there and the moro has become a image of

cuban nationality and in particular havana. in that lighthouse you find, you read an -- when you enter the havana harbor, you find an irish name. that lighthouse was known for many years as the odono lighthouse. who was this person, odono the man that oversaw the project of the lighthouse in 1844 and he was a governor of cuba from 1843 to 48, but he was a spanish man of irish origin