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. *

these images inside this bowl came from vessels that were anastazi. and you can track the movement of styles across the southwest, across centuries. and i look into these and i see people from the high desert living down in the pines of central arizona. i see the shapes of their lives still recorded, that the anastazi didn't disappear, they just moved and they carried everything with them. and when they ran into other cultures, they adjusted. they changed the colors of their vessels but they kept the same images, images of a landscape that is worn open, that is controlled by basic elements, by wind, by water, by gravity. see the shape of the world where i have spent my life, where i have been walking, looking for these stories. and just to give you a sense of scale here,

as i understand more of the anastazi, it is hard to say they ever truly vanished. the more i track them, it more it seems they are right in front of me until i can feel body heat in their foot steps. it is not unthinkable that somebody might return to this granary, maybe a century from now, relieved to find a sign of ancestry deep in this river gorge. i climbed down to this granary and laid my hand on its stone, feeling the grit of sand and the hardness of rock. a person could be found here in a thousand years, a person kneeling in the moment of decision. i climbed out and went back to my career, the obsidian night closing around me. i climbed into the canoe and swept the paddle across the water, setting a wake across the mirror of stars. i'd like to show you some images from this place. this place being the southwest where i have spent my entire life. i don't know how far i've walked out there. i don't know how many pairs of boots that i've gone through where i've taken needles and dental floss and sewed the leather back together. i don't know how long i've been w