The co-op bookstore for avid readers
Book Cover for: Tracing Time: Seasons of Rock Art on the Colorado Plateau, Craig Childs

Tracing Time: Seasons of Rock Art on the Colorado Plateau

Craig Childs

Silver Medal Winner:Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards -Regional Book (2022)

2023 Southwest Books of the Year winner, 2023 Reading the West Nonfiction Award winner, Foreword INDIES Silver Award winner, and Colorado Book Award finalist

"Childs guides readers through a long lived in landscape and helps us see more clearly what's been drawn upon the ancient stones."

--CAMILLE T. DUNGY

Craig Childs bears witness to rock art of the Colorado Plateau--bighorn sheep pecked behind boulders, tiny spirals in stone, human figures with upraised arms shifting with the desert light, each one a portal to the open mouth of time. With a spirit of generosity, humility, and love of the arid, intricate landscapes of the desert Southwest, Childs sets these ancient communications in context, inviting readers to look and listen deeply.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Torrey House Press
  • Publish Date: Apr 19th, 2022
  • Pages: 224
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 7.87in - 5.20in - 0.71in - 0.65lb
  • EAN: 9781948814577
  • Categories: EssaysHistory - PrehistoricEssays

More books to explore

Book Cover for: Walking/Wild Apples, Henry David Thoreau
Book Cover for: First, Catch: Study of a Spring Meal, Thom Eagle
Book Cover for: The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky (Pulitzer Prize Finalist), Ellen Meloy
Book Cover for: A World Beneath the Sands: The Golden Age of Egyptology, Toby Wilkinson
Book Cover for: The Radiant Lives of Animals, Linda Hogan
Book Cover for: Repast: Dining Out at the Dawn of the New American Century, 1900-1910, Michael Lesy
Book Cover for: Rural Hours, Susan Cooper
Book Cover for: Xylotheque: Essays, Yelizaveta P. Renfro
Book Cover for: The Ends of the Earth, W. S. Merwin
Book Cover for: Math with Bad Drawings: Illuminating the Ideas That Shape Our Reality, Ben Orlin
Book Cover for: Landmarks, Robert MacFarlane

About the Author

CRAIG CHILDS has published more than a dozen critically acclaimed books, including Virga and Bone, The Secret Knowledge of Water, and Atlas of a Lost World. He is a contributing editor at Adventure Journal Quarterly and his work has appeared in the Atlantic, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times. He lives in southwest Colorado.

More books by Craig Childs

Book Cover for: The Wild Dark: Finding the Night Sky in the Age of Light, Craig Childs
Book Cover for: House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest, Craig Childs
Book Cover for: The Secret Knowledge of Water: Discovering the Essence of the American Desert, Craig Childs
Book Cover for: The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild, Craig Childs
Book Cover for: Atlas of a Lost World: Travels in Ice Age America, Craig Childs
Book Cover for: Finders Keepers: A Tale of Archaeological Plunder and Obsession, Craig Childs
Book Cover for: Virga & Bone: Essays from Dry Places, Craig Childs
Book Cover for: Stone Desert, Craig Childs
Book Cover for: Soul of Nowhere, Craig Childs
Book Cover for: The Way Out: A True Story of Ruin and Survival, Craig Childs

Praise for this book

"Childs brings refreshing humility . . . Readers might find here, along with a soul-saving historical perspective, a place of calm amid our noise."

--BOOKLIST


"In Tracing Time, Craig Childs invites us to join him on a journey to visit, experience, and try to understand the ancient rock writings scattered throughout the storied northern Southwest--a journey that includes many colorful components and even more colorful characters. This is not an investigation, in the typical and tiresome sense, but a meditation. Punctuated with reflections on Childs's own experience and insights shared with him by descendant knowledge-keepers, Tracing Time is an engaging glimpse into a world both fascinating and fundamentally unknowable to those who aren't born into it."

--R. E. BURRILLO, author of Behind the Bears Ears


"Early in Tracing Time Craig Childs writes, 'This, I am told, is one way to find rock art. Walk around clapping and when you hear a good echo, go look.' This book is a long, glorious clapping session. It is also many many careful, patient, thoughtful, loving looks. Tracing Time holds in it voices that echo across years and also the adorned walls off of which so many stories have been refracted through time. Childs guides readers through a long-lived-in landscape and helps us see more clearly what's been drawn upon the ancient stones."

--CAMILLE T. DUNGY, author of Soil: The History of a Black Mother's Garden


"In a beautifully written new book, Craig Childs climbs desert boulders to find meaning inscribed in the rock, but finds instead mystery. He treks through redrock canyons to see rock art, but is surprised to find himself listening instead, as the artists' voices echo through deep time. As refreshing as a desert storm, Tracing Time is a welcome invitation into the continuities and conundrums of time."

--KATHLEEN DEAN MOORE, author of Earth's Wild Music


"The enigma of rock art of the American Southwest has puzzled archaeologists and amateurs for decades. In Tracing Time, Craig Childs adds to our knowledge by listening to the elders as he travels to hundreds of sites, yet the sense of mystery and imagination still swells."

--ANDY NETTELL, Back of Beyond Books