During more than a thousand years before Europeans arrived in 1540, the native peoples of what is now the southwestern United States and northern Mexico developed an architecture of rich diversity and beauty. Vestiges of thousands of these dwellings and villages still remain, in locations ranging from Colorado in the north to Chihuahua in the south and from Nevada in the west to eastern New Mexico-a geographical area of some 300,000 square miles....

Southwestern archaeologists have long speculated about the scale and impact of ancient population movements. In Ancestral Hopi Migrations, Patrick Lyons infers the movement of large numbers of people from the Kayenta and Tusayan regions of northern Arizona to every major river valley in Arizona, parts of New Mexico, and northern Mexico. Building upon earlier studies, Lyons uses chemical sourcing of ceramics and analyses of painted pottery designs...

A boy and his grandfather go hiking in the Arizona desert, where they observe the many rock carvings and imagine the lives of the Hohokam people who lived there in ancient times.

"Cheek draws on the work of the foremost archaeologists and anthropologists of the region, and explores some 25 major Southwestern prehistoric sites, to chronicle the birth, rise, decline, and ultimate collapse of the great Sinagua, Anasazi, Hohokam, Mogollon, and Salado cultures. Ravishing color photographs illustrate the terrain as well as the spectacular artifacts and ruins left behind by these ancient peoples."

Discusses some of the things archaeologists have learned about three major groups of Indians that lived in the American Southwest: the Anasazi, the Hohokam, and the Mogollon.