David Roberts, take two: More than an obit

I posted a non-takedown obit to Southwestern and mountaineering writer David Roberts two months ago. But ... while still not wanting to do a takedown, thought that Roberts' writing about the Anasazi and the Colorado Plateau, and one non-Anasazi work in particular, needed deeper scrutiny. 

And it shall now get it.

On “In Search of the Old Ones,” Roberts undercuts himself in a couple of ways. One biggie — and here, he’s not alone, but with many archaologists — is the claim that the cliff dwellings were defense first. Given that, as we know with “new agriculture” studies in the Old World, and occasional admissions about the Anasazi by Roberts himself, they were NOT “settled agriculturalists” but were rather “multiple strategies” peoples, they would have, as others have noted, fled their villages on attack as strategy No. 1. He does partially back off that, and notes some anthropologists do talk about how war in dispersed bands like this would have been crop raiding first, but still, he pushes.

On Fred Blackburn and the “Outdoor Museum,” I get where both of them, er, mainly Blackburn, come from. That said, Fred was more circumspect than Dave. 

Per Roberts and BLM rangers at Kane Gulch saying people come out here for “Roberts’ pot,” and one of them saying, “Tell Roberts to shut the fuck up,” I think Roberts … while not totally a part of the problem, most likely did have a thumb on the scale. When he wrote the book, he knew that beasts of burden were about to be banned from lower Kane Gulch and that a permit system was likely for the whole gulch, and he not only mentioned that pot, he later mentioned the basket that, if anything, is even more priceless.

This is not totally to hammer Blackburn, who was more than "just a Grand Gulch BLM ranger," though Roberts doesn't note his full background. (Not mentioning that, including his work for the Park Service as well as the BLM, makes him look like a benighted diamond in the rough.) That said, per Steve Lekson, yeah, you may protect these items from being forgotten in a museum, but neither Fred nor David are fully trained, and therefore you never get “provenance” in the first place. (Blackburn helped found Crow Canyon, and even more than Roberts, knows something about in situ issues, but he's still not an archaeologist.)

Sidebar: I also know that, contra one reviewer of one of Roberts' books, but rather, per Craig Childs (page 4 if the linking isn't correct), just having everything sold to the public is the worst answer of all outside of, of course, unrestricted looting. Guy was probably a Mormon related to those of SE Utah.

I “grokked” at Mesa Verde’s visitor center four years ago the sequel, “The Lost World of the Old Ones.” From what I remember, it didn’t add a lot to the original, which is why I didn’t buy it when I got back home. He may be partially right about Mesa Verde being locked up. Jonathan Thompson at HCN recently claimed that the park’s visitation had taken hits recently. Set aside 2020 cuz COVID, of course, and the reality is that while it’s off of its 650K per year or so 1990s numbers, its rolling average for the last 20 years has been 550K. So, down … but not out. And, who knows why?

 

(Update: Just back from my first visit to the Wetherill Mesa part of Mesa Verde, I can indeed say that Roberts is right about the Park Service trashing the Wetherills' memory. Visitor center displays make them sound like little more than pothunters. And, the NPS won't even tell you that on Wetherill Mesa, the Nordenskiöld "signature" it touts at Step House looks to be an overwrite of a Wetherill one (which one, I'm not sure). Look:

 

Oops!

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Now, the biggie? Roberts “admits” he got Everett Ruess’ death wrong, but only in saying “I got a lot of shit from the bloggers.” That IS arrogance, in that people were cautioning him even before his National Geographic Adventure story came out to exercise more caution.

It WAS bad science as to how the burial site was handled and how the tested bones were handled at the first site, which had DNA contamination and which Roberts doesn’t mention. It WAS bad science to not check dental records. That’s a 2011 interview, which meant Scott Thybony’s book, seeming to confirm Ruess died from a fall, wasn’t out yet. BUT, Philip Fradkin’s book WAS out, which notes that Ruess was a pothunter, among other things. Stuff that Roberts doesn’t cover. Yes, the pub date was after Roberts’ interview, but if Fradkin, who while a great natural history writer has never struck me as an outdoorsman, could include info that Roberts didn’t, it seems like Roberts, curmudgeon and all, wanted to promote a romantic image of Ruess. And, the pub date of Fradkin’s book in 2011 was less than 2 months after Roberts’ interview. Surely he would have heard some prepress about it.

Roberts may not have been a professional historian, but he was trying to play one, and doing OK until his … romanticism?? Got the better of him. And, AFAIK, he’s never apologized for the rush to press. Nor anything else associated with professional authors who knew better, not just bloggers, giving him deserved shit. (Also, in the last chapter of the book, before he gets to acknowledging “It ain’t Ruess after all,” he was all too ready to soak up the praise of “the bloggers.”)

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The Pueblo Revolt, of books of his I’ve read thoroughly, grokked or skimmed, to me remains his best. It’s pretty thorough. It gives weight to different interpretations within different Pueblo oral and modern histories. It gives weight to different modern interpretations. It’s less pushy toward Pueblo reticence than “The Old Ones.”

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The sequel to “In Search of the Old Ones,” titled “The Lost World of the Old Ones”? Too derivative of his original, and not a lot of new stuff, despite being 20 years later, as noted above.

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“Sandstone Spine”? I read it long ago and never wrote a review. It was good, though.

 

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His Escalante book, just reviewed? Solid but not fantastic, warts and all.

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Oh, if per one reviewer of his Bears Ears book, he says of Newspaper Rock:

Rich though it is, Newspaper Rock has never captivated me. With all its vignettes crowded into a single slab of Wingate sandstone, the panel is just too busy for my liking. It is of course the height of dilettantism, or of cultural myopia, to apply a photo editor’s sneer to a panoply of signs and symbols graven by many different artists across a span of twenty centuries

we have a lot of Roberts summed up in one comment.

It’s not only a sneer, it’s not only dilettantism, it’s petard hoisting. Not to talk about what possible meaning there might be behind the symbols being so numerous, so varied and yes, so crammed, undercuts the idea of how much he yearns to know the Anasazi and their “disappearance,” as well as the other peoples who left figures there. And, given that he identified himself as "the most compulsive writer I know," one would think he'd have a less dilettanish attitude.

And, after I re-read “In Search of the Old Ones the last time, “romanticism” popped into my head more about Roberts. I think that, as an atheist who might have one foot in the world of Gnu Atheism if prodded enough, this romanticism is something he really didn’t want to reveal. Or maybe, didn’t even like about himself. That said, he was a romantic about the Romanesque churches in Catalonia, it’s clear to me. I think he was romantic about Anasazi issues, too, hence his attitude toward Newspaper Rock.

I definitely think he was a romantic about Ruess, and that's why his book doesn't look much at Ruess' personal life, unlike Fradkin's book.

 

Update, June 13, 2025: First, has it been 3 1/2 years since Roberts' death? Wow. 

 

I came here to add an observation to his desire to know the Anasazi pre-history, and constantly being rebuffed by tribal historians of the various modern puebloan people that are their descendants. Yet, I see seeming approval and agreement when he cites Jeffrey Dean in "In Search Of" talking about the twin "fault lines" across Puebloan oral tradition — the rise of the katsina phenomenon and the Spanish entrada. So, why would you want to know about something that you think is suspect anyway? (He doesn't cite Steve Lekson, who elsewhere has said that you should not extrapolate from modern Puebloan ideas.)

That said, the book is dated in other ways, and Roberts' focus is narrow.

It's dated in that Christy Turner has been exposed as a hypocrite on his use, or misuse, of his "six factors" to determine cannibalism. Leigh Kuwanwisiwma, formerly known as Leigh Jenkins, was able to emerge from what appears to have been a former intimidation by Turner. (Sadly, he died earlier this year.) Even an anthropologist pro like Kurt Donguske originally felt. he had to fight Turner point by point. Personally, I think that ritual or metaphysical cannibalism, as opposed to subsistence cannibalism, has been extremely rare around most of the world for most of its history.

 

As for the roads at Chaco? There's new thought that maybe they're watercourses adapted into roads.

Both the cannibalism and the roads issue are discussed by me here.

Second, it's interesting that throughout his Southwestern interest of the last 25-30 years of his life, Chaco, and other non-cliff dwelling Anasazi sites, simply don't hold that much interest for him. Oh, he'll touch on Lekson and other big guns talking about the Chacoan Phenomenon, as in, did it have an "empire" or something, but actually looking at the ruins? Nope.

Roberts does note his interest in "the vertical," then claims all national parks and monuments protecting Anasazi sites other than Chaco are cliff dwellings. Interesting that he "overlooks" Aztec. And Hovenweep, which I hadn't originally thought about. And, although it's "just" a BLM national monument, Canyons of the Ancients. And, though it's not dedicated to Puebloan ruins, there are plenty of them inside Petrified Forest National Park. And, though not Anasazi, the Hohokam and their descendants never dwelled in cliff sites. Nor did Roberts see any of that around Paquime in northern Mexico. In short, Roberts was, IMO, lying to the public. And, presumably, lying to himself.

Third, contra the claims of Roberts, and many of his professional mentors of 25 or more years ago in his salad days of wandering the Southwest, per "The Pueblo World Transformed," in book form as "New Mexico and the Pimería Alta" (my review), there was actually a fair degree of inequality at the time of the Spanish entradas. (David Wengrows of the world should also take note.) Yes, the Spanish may have increased that to a degree, and the Americans certainly did, but it already existed, from our latest determinations.