My new book, Bears Ears—A Visual Introduction, is now available at the online store of Canyonlands Natural History Association here.
Softcover, 10 x 10 inches, 148 pages, $24.99. Click on the photo to buy.
From the preface:
Ten years ago, in 2013, Dr. Willian D. Lipe and I collaborated on a book entitled Cliff Dwellers of Cedar Mesa, The Culture, Sites, and Exodus of the Ancestral Puebloans. While ostensibly about the Ancestral Puebloan people who built and lived in the “cliff dwellings” of Cedar Mesa eight hundred years ago, the content was more expansive and described the evolution and succession of regional cultures in existence well before those people and long after them. The book intended to raise awareness of the rapid and widespread degradation and looting of vulnerable and irreplaceable cultural artifacts and to argue for some form of protection. ...
... The uncertainty about the Monument’s future delayed the publishing of this book and persists today. Moreover, the Monument’s effectiveness in protecting vulnerable sites has yet to be established. That is why I do not provide locations of cultural sites or directions to them in this book. However, there is growing optimism about the Monument’s stability, and the more people are informed about it, the more likely they will advocate for its preservation through future administrations.
This book is intended as an introduction to the Monument for the first-time visitor. I am a photographer, so the book is a visual introduction, by region, to the landscape and cultural treasures of this vast Monument. I am not a geologist, but relevant information on geology has made it into the text and captions. I am not an archaeologist, but a renowned expert on Ancestral Puebloan people contributed the cultural timeline and a section on archaeological resources to the book. I am not a Native American and cannot presume to speak for people whose ancestors — the original North Americans — were connected to this land for millennia.
Any expertise I may have derives from decades of lugging a camera and tripod, on foot, over much of what is now Bears Ears National Monument. All the book’s photographs came from those perambulations. But stories also came from these explorations — many of which I share in the captions. These experiences were unique to me and naturally and inevitably influenced my feelings about the place. This book is thus best understood as a visual introduction to the Monument — one literally and figuratively seen through my lens — and one that is unavoidably and unrepentantly biased. In other words, I am showing you what I found interesting and attractive.
Donald J. Rommes
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