They dragged more than two hundred thousand trees across fifty miles of desert to raise a canyon full of great houses where almost no one seems to have lived.

Welcome to the Ancestral Pueblo world. For over a thousand years it stretched across the Colorado Plateau: monumental architecture but no kings, long-distance trade but no money, an astronomy exact enough to track the 18.6-year cycle of the moon. Its people drank chocolate carried up from Mexico, kept scarlet macaws in the high desert, and made turquoise a marker of status and ritual.

Around 1300 they left the Four Corners. For a century, popular history called it a collapse and a mystery. It was neither. The people are still here, in the pueblos of New Mexico and Arizona, and so is the record of where they went and why.

Ancestral Pueblo Worlds brings that record together: tree-ring dates read to the year, the chemistry of a thousand-year-old cacao cup, and the oral histories of the Hopi, Zuni, and Acoma, told in collaboration with the communities whose ancestors built these places.

The deep history of the American Southwest, with the myths stripped out.