ANCIENT LIFE IN THE AMERICAN SOUTHWEST [SOLD]

ANCIENT LIFE IN THE AMERICAN SOUTHWEST

with an Introduction on the General History of the American Race

By Edgar L. Hewett

Tudor Publishing Co, New York, 1943

First edition, Hardcover with slip jacket.  392 pages, over 40 illustrations, very good condition

From the Slipcover

“In the Southwest of the United States, land of limitless spaces, of cliff and canyon, mountain and mesa, sky and desert, there has long lived a free people of the first, the only real American race.

“This is their story.  The painstaking research of many years has reconstructed the record, drawing it from the dusty face of the desert itself; from the crumbling remnants of once pretentious houses, from ancient rubbish heaps and burial pits, from the broken shards of pottery, from the skulls and bones of freemen who died before Columbus; from old ditches and canals rivaling those of Egypt; from the folk-lore, the traditions, the art and habits of scattered and decimated descendant; finally, and perhaps most importantly, through modern psychoanalytical methods, from the crannies of the living Indian brain, where ancestral memories sleep.

“The pick and spade of the archaeologist coupled with the imagination of the artist have recreated a history of an almost perfect adaptation to environment, a story as fascinating, as glamourous as that of any race on earth.

“There emerge the Pueblos of the valleys, the cliff-dwellers of the canyons, the peoples of the painted desert, the Navaho and the Hopi, the fabled Grand Quivira, the truth about the Seven Cities of Cibola, and the dramatic record of a mysterious race of great power, the master builders of the desert, who in a strip of land ten miles long by one mile wide built homes more enduring than any other in the ancient world.

“The common heritage of these old communities is revealed; their genius for successful republican government; their love of beauty, their mastery of construction and design; their physical superiority; their dominating love of the home and the beautiful imagery of their folk-lore and their ceremonial religion.”