The Cedar Mesa country in southeast Utah is a land of convoluted cliffs with arches, natural bridges, hoodoos, spires, hat rocks, ledges, and alcoves. It is a land of flash floods and extreme temperatures that demands much from those who would explore it. It is also an unparalleled museum of geological features and ancestral Puebloan culture. This fascinating culture flowered for more than a millennium and visitors to southeast Utah are treated to a sampling of archaeological wonders.

A Hiking Guide to Cedar Mesa describes sixty-three routes, ranging from quarter-mile walks to fifteen-mile day hikes, loops, and multi-day backpack trips. There is essential information on permits, weather, gear, road, trailhead access, geology, human history in the region, and leave-no-trace camping.

Care is given to name only those well-known archaeological sites that are visible or immediately accessible from roads. Throughout, the author emphasizes proper visitation protocol for fragile archaeological sites. He states, "I have been touched by this landscape and would prefer to keep its teachings and secrets to myself, but I cannot. The experience of the desert should be available to everyone with the motivation to encounter it."

Dialectic is the new journal of the School of Architecture at the University of Utah. True to dialectical thinking, the journal brings together opposing voices in the discipline on architectural, urban and wider cultural issues. Deliberately housed within academia, it invites voices from practitioners, scholars and educators to address pedagogy as much as practice. It publishes global perspectives for taking local action. Dialectic is a critical venue for articulating alternative positions on challenges in the highly interconnected, yet tragically disconnected world of contemporary architecture.
 
The second issue of Dialectic, “Architecture between Boom and Bust,” is dedicated to the question of economy. While the boom of the 1990s and 2000s made architects and media designers the epitome of the urban creative class, the credit crunch and economic downturn of 2008 dramatically shrunk the profession. With the collapse of the U.S. housing market arguably the trigger for global financial and economic crisis, the building industry became a primary victim. All this has directly affected architects, whose fees are linked to building costs and built volume.
 
Dramatic economic turns, while involving individual hardship, are nevertheless great indices for making visible the immanent connections of the discipline to the marketplace. They challenge our understanding of what it means “to architect.” The history of the architecture profession in the twentieth century bears witness to the attempts of the Modern Movement to bring the elite cultural products to the ordinary person. Architects in the 1960s critiqued the paternalism of their disciplinary forebears and interrogated the role of an architect both as a social engineer and as a moderator of participatory design. The accompanying post-modern turn to semiotics and imagery moved the discipline to the opposite position of “art for art’s sake.” The public learned to expect extravagant signature buildings, formal experiments and endless artistic ingenuity. With this, they traded the role of the architect as a keeper of a common good for a celebrity figure who would bring global fame and tourists to their communities. Now, following the economic downturn in 2008, what may we expect from the next calibration of architecture to society? 

Just exactly where do we find the supernatural in the contemporary world? It’s both pervasive—everywhere—and specific—a particular somewhere. Otherworldly traditions and stories still spread through oral narration. They pervade mass media and the digital world and often form the stuff of hypermodern folklore<m>the stew of folk, popular, consumer, and digital culture that constitutes much of contemporary life. People also imbue specific places—from the local haunted house or cemetery to whole towns or cities—with supernatural manifestations or significance.
 
Putting the Supernatural in Its Place explores zombies, vampires, witches, demented nuns, mediums, and ghosts in their natural (and unnatural) habitats while making sense of the current ubiquity of the supernatural on the Internet, in the movies, in tourism, and in places like New Orleans. This unique study of how we locate the supernatural sheds light on why certain sites and their stories captivate us and shows how pondering the supernatural can bring a better understanding of the places we create and inhabit. Each chapter is authored by a noted folklorist who examines the supernatural as it appears “in place.” Among the locales are Salem, Massachusetts; Lily Dale, New York; and Internet fan sites for the Twilight movies and the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Supernatural places have the potential to alter perceptions of reality—sometimes enchanting, sometimes terrifying, and sometimes even schooling those who experience them. Ultimately, the authors demonstrate that, culturally speaking, the supernatural’s place is important and not trivial. 

In 1935, during the wind-swept years of the Dust Bowl, three people went missing on separate occasions in the rugged canyon country of southeastern Utah, a place “wild, desolate, mysterious.” A thirteen-year old girl, Lucy Garrett, was tricked into heading west with the man who had murdered her father under the pretense of reuniting with him. At the same time, a search was underway for Dan Thrapp, a young scientist on leave from the American Museum of Natural History. Others were scouring the same region for an artist, Everett Ruess, who had disappeared into “the perfect labyrinth.” 

Intrigued by this unusual string of coincidental disappearances, Scott Thybony set out to learn what happened. His investigations took him from Island in the Sky to Skeleton Mesa, from Texas to Tucson, and from the Green River to the Red. He traced the journey of Lucy Garrett from the murder of her father to her dramatic courtroom testimony. Using the pages of an old journal he followed the route of Dan Thrapp as he crossed an expanse of wildly rugged country with a pair of outlaws. Thrapp’s story of survival in an unforgiving land is a poignant counterpoint to the fate of the artist Everett Ruess, which the New York Times has called “one of the most enduring mysteries of the modern West.” Thybony draws on extensive research and a lifetime of exploration to create a riveting story of these three lives.

In 1939, William H. McDougall was a newspaperman from Salt Lake City who quit his job and went to work for the Japan Times, an English-language newspaper in Tokyo, and later for the United Press, for which he covered the Japanese occupation of Shanghai and the fall of the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). When the ship on which he had escaped from Java was sunk, he reached the island of Sumatra, where he was captured and imprisoned by the Japanese until 1945. 

McDougall’s letters to his family offer a rare and detailed look at daily life in Tokyo and in Japanese-occupied Shanghai during the months leading up to the Pearl Harbor attack. After his imprisonment in Sumatra, he began keeping a daily journal of his experiences as a POW. Published here for the first time are the journals he retrieved at the end of World War II.

Written by an articulate and perceptive professional reporter, McDougall's letters and diaries offer an intimate, personal narrative of conditions in wartime East Asia. 

Among the most striking features of the northwestern New Mexico landscape are the more than 130 fortresses and towers built on boulders, promontories, and mesa rims. These "pueblitos" in the traditional Navajo homeland of Dinétah have been a key piece of evidence used by archaeologists to infer a massive immigration of Puebloans into the Navajo country following the Spanish re-conquest of New Mexico (ca. 1700), yet they have never been comprehensively analyzed.

Using a database of tree-ring dates taken from beams and wood used to construct these pueblitos, Ronald Towner shows in this volume that most pueblitos are unrelated to Puebloan immigration or the re-conquest. He concludes that Navajos constructed the masonry structures and hogans contemporaneously for protection against Ute raiders and later Spanish entradas. Further, most were occupied for relatively brief periods and population density was much lower than has been assumed.

Towner points to a new model of Navajo ethnogenesis, based on a revised early population distribution and a variety of other means of incorporating non-Athapaskan elements into Navajo culture, making Defending the Dinétah a major contribution to Navajo studies. 

For 12,000 years, people have left a rich record of their experiences in Utah’s Capitol Reef National Park. In The Capitol Reef Reader, award-winning author and photographer Stephen Trimble collects the best of this writing—160 years worth of words that capture the spirit of the park and its surrounding landscape in personal narratives, philosophical riffs, and historic and scientific records.

The volume features nearly fifty writers who have anchored their attention and imagination in Utah’s least-known national park. The bedrock elders of Colorado Plateau literature are here (Clarence Dutton, Wallace Stegner, Edward Abbey), as are generations of writers who love this land (including Ellen Meloy, Craig Childs, Charles Bowden, Renny Russell, Ann Zwinger, Gary Ferguson, and Rose Houk). Their pieces are a pleasure to read and each reveals a facet of Capitol Reef’s story, creating a gem of a volume. Editor Stephen Trimble guides and orients with commentary and context.

A visual survey of the park in almost 100 photographs adds another layer to our understanding of this place. Historic photos, pictures from Trimble’s forty-five years of hiking the park, as well as images from master visual artists who have worked in Capitol Reef are included. No other book captures the essence of Capitol Reef like this one. 

Part of the National Park Reader series, edited by Lance Newman and David Stanley

This study of prehistoric violence, homicide, and cannibalism explodes the myth that the Anasazi and other Southwest Indians were simple, peaceful farmers.

Until quite recently, Southwest prehistory studies have largely missed or ignored evidence of violent competition. Christy and Jacqueline Turner’s study of prehistoric violence, homicide, and cannibalism explodes the myth that the Anasazi and other Southwest Indians were simple, peaceful farmers. Using detailed osteological analyses and other lines of evidence the Turners show that warfare, violence, and their concomitant horrors were as common in the ancient Southwest as anywhere else in the world.

The special feature of this massively documented study is its multi-regional assessment of episodic human bones assemblages (scattered floor deposits or charnel pits) by taphonomic analysis, which considers what happens to bones from the time of death to the time of recovery. During the past thirty years, the authors and other analysts have identified a minimal perimortem taphonomic signature of burning, pot polishing, anvil abrasions, bone breakage, cut marks, and missing vertebrae that closely match the signatures of animal butchering and is frequently associated with additional evidence of violence. More than seventy-five archaeological sited containing several hundred individuals are carefully examined for the cannibalism signature. Because this signature has not been reported for any sites north of Mexico, other than those in the Southwest, the authors also present detailed comparisons with Mesoamerican skeletal collections where human sacrifice and cannibalism were known to have been practiced. The authors review several hypotheses for Southwest cannibalism: starvation, social pathology, and institutionalized violence and cannibalism. In the latter case, they present evidence for a potential Mexican connection and demonstrate that most of the known cannibalized series are located temporally and spatially near Chaco great houses.