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 tha

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

i see the colorado plateau. this bowl is from american museum of natural history and that's where it is now. that's the storage place. where it was from before is pueblo bonito in chaco canyon where there were rooms filled to the ceiling with bowls stacked within each other, bowls like this. all their designs, you can kind of get a glimpse around this. they have this flawless symmetry blending all the way around. it looks like that place. it looks like that landscape. i look into this and i see the sharp edges of the land. i see the way the earth is shaped out there. i see the routes in their vessels. i mean, to understand these, this one came out of a 13th century site in southwest colorado and i would sit with these bowls for hours and hours, drawing them into my sketch book because that was the only way i could really understand the complexity of how they got their symmetries to match up because i could never get them to match up in my drawings. i could never do a 100 percent accurate rendition of these becau

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, unbu

it was a site, an archeological site on the colorado plateau, that i ran into a number of years ago. and i've gone down to it a couple of times now. when i first found it, i had been on the river for 7 days in a canoe. and i tied off and broke through the tamarisk which if you've ever been down on those desert rivers, the tamarisk, the invasive species of plant that runs along the shore line, it makes this jungle, this dry, hard jungle that you just work your way through until you have sticks stabbed into your ears and hair and tamis buds is what they call it, it's the stuff that rains down off these trees and it fills up the back of your shirt. i came up to this flat area and this cliff was there and i saw a piece of pottery on the ground, a broken piece of pottery. if you start looking around, you see broken pieces of pottery that date back 800 years, 900, 1200 years, and i dropped down on my hands and knees when i saw that one and i started brushing away sand until i could see others and i blew the sand away and i could see the rim of a broken pot. once i saw that, my eye was much