Rebecca M. Douglass, Author

Last week was a narrative photo post about our backpack trip through Grand Gulch in the Bears Ears National Monument. Today I'm sharing a bunch of the cool archaeology we saw there, with little comment and no order :)  Partly this is because I'm lazy, and partly because I don't have the knowledge to say much. The ruins and rock are are lumped together as "Ancestral Puebloan," but range in age from maybe 500 to 1800 years old. A stop at the museum in Blanding after the hike gave us some idea of the ages of some of the potsherds we saw, but I will need many repetitions to really get it sorted. Some ruins are pretty much inaccessible to ordinary mortals. I imagine rockfall has closed routes the original inhabitants used, but they were also definitely intrepid climbers. Other ruins were easily reached (if I got to them, they were easy). On this mud wall you can still see the handprints of the person who made it. I sat with that a while, thinking about the person who ...

I'm headed to the Bears Ears National Monument in a few weeks, so I figured I should do some more reading about the area. It's not new history to me, but a refresher never hurts, and many details were new. Title: The Bears Ears: A Human History of America's Most Endangered Wilderness Author: David Roberts Publication Info: 2021, W.W. Norton. 336 pages. Source: Library Publisher's Blurb: The Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah, created by President Obama in 2016 and eviscerated by the Trump administration in 2017, contains more archaeological sites than any other region in the United States. It’s also a spectacularly beautiful landscape, a mosaic of sandstone canyons and bold mesas and buttes. This wilderness, now threatened by oil and gas drilling, unrestricted grazing, and invasion by Jeep and ATV, is at the center of the greatest environmental battle in America since the damming of the Colorado River to create Lake Powell in the 1950s. In The ...