Unearthing the Past

Native America presents an infinitely surprising and fascinating deep history of the continent's Indigenous peoples. Kenneth Feder, a leading expert on Native American history and archaeology, draws on archaeological, historical, and cultural evidence to tell the ongoing story, more than 20,000 years in the making, of an incredibly resilient and diverse mixture of peoples, revealing how they have ingeniously adapted to the many changing environments of the continent, from the Arctic to the desert Southwest.

Native America introduces close to a hundred different peoples, each with their own language, economic and social system, and religious beliefs. We learn about hunters of enormous Ice Age beasts; people who raised stone toolmaking to the level of art; a Native American empire ruled by a king and queen, with a huge city at its center and colonies hundreds of miles away; a society that made the desert bloom by designing complex irrigation networks; brilliant architects who built fairy castles in sandstone cliffs; and artists who produced beautiful and moving petroglyphs and pictographs that reflect their deep thinking about history, the sacred, the land, and the sky.

Native America is not about peoples of the past, but vibrant, living ones with an epic history of genius and tenacity—a history that everyone should know.