Mancos Public Library will host a lecture/slideshow & booksigning by Bill & Beth Sagstetter in celebration of their recently published book about the ancient peoples of SW Colorado entitled ‘The Cliff Dwelling Speak’. It is free & everyone is welcome. There will also be copies of the book for sale!
The Cliff Dwellings Speak
Date: Thursday, July, 15th
Time: 7pm
Place: MPL, Main Meeting Room, 211 West First Street
About the Book:
“For years we struggled to get to remote cliff dwellings – from the Four Corners Region to the Sierra Madres in Mexico – only to be disappointed when we arrived. To our non-professional eyes there appeared to be very little left. The cliff dwellings were mute for us.
We were frustrated – we sensed each one of them had a story to tell, but we could not decipher it. What could cliff dwellings possibly tell casual visitors like us?
And then one day doing library research we stumbled across papers of the early archaeologists from the turn of the twentieth century — before there was much science to apply to the study of archaeology. The observation techniques they developed were perfect for casual visitors like us — now we could fathom at least some of the mysteries of the ancient ruins. For example, what it means when we encounter walls that are heavily smoke-blackened. Or, how to train our eyes to see the wooden pegs imbedded in the walls and what that might mean. Suddenly the ancient cliff ruins did not seem so inscrutable anymore. We were spellbound!
This book will guide you around a site in Sherlock Holmes fashion, giving you very real tools for understanding cliff dwellings. Beginning with preservation – that is, the proper way to visit them without inadvertently inflicting damage. It asks the question why they might have built these spectacular ruins. Carefully interwoven with the archaeology is the ethnography of the modern Pueblo people– the descendants of the cliff dwellers.”
Bill and Beth Sagstetter
About the Authors: Bill and Beth Sagstetter are a photographer/writer team living in Denver. They have been researching, writing, photographing and filming western and southwestern U.S. subjects for forty years.
Their byline appears on hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles, a dozen films and three best-selling books. One of their films won an award at the 1978 Aspen Arts Film Festival.
Their newest book, The Cliff Dwellings Speak is the culmination of a lifetime of exploration and research of the cliff dwellings from Southwestern Colorado to Northern Mexico.
entitled The Taylors’ Civil War. This moving, action-filled story of the Taylor family, farmers in Virginia at the time of the Civil War, portrays the family’s struggle and hardship during this time when they too suffer loss of life and property. Once the Civil War is over, the conflict continues as they deal with thievery in the form of the carpetbaggers, who prey on the South at war’s end.
