The pick and shovel work of archeology sounds boring: all that careful mapping, scraping and digging. But when its artifacts are enhanced with anthropological legends from Arizona Amerindian cultures, intergenerational oral histories from descendants of the original Hopi and Tewa clans, and archival photos and maps, the resulting package is absorbing. Bancroft and Francis Parkman Prize-winning historian and anthropologist James F. Brooks (Captives and Cousins) pulls together a focused history of the massacre of the Antelope Mesa's Awat'ovi community in 1700.
Mesa of Sorrows begins with the Peabody Museum's archeological expedition to the site in the late 19th century, where important ceramic pottery sherds dating back centuries were eclipsed by a significant cache of human skeletal remains exhibiting signs of violent dismemberment and torching. Brooks then shifts to the centuries-long history of the Arizona Indian tribes that migrated in and out of the area's buttes and mesas in response to war, starvation, trade and drought. Hopi pueblo communities were already a multi-clan, multi-lingual territory when Spanish Franciscans came along in the 16th century to add a new disruptive element to the mix. Finally, drawing on stories of the Hopi historian Albert Yava (née Nuvayoiyava--Big Falling Snow), Brooks ties together science, history and legend to explain the seemingly uncharacteristic Hopi-on-Hopi violence at Awat'ovi. He speculates that the massacre fit a long tradition of periodic Hopi purging of Pueblos who had lost their way--concluding that the tribal leaders decided that "the corruption at Awat'ovi... must end so balance could be restored." Brooks makes archeology and anthropology fascinating. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.