Cutthroat Ruin
Hovenweep National Monument, Colorado

As I wander the ruins of Hovenweep I wonder if someone were to challenge me- a modern educated human to build with no concrete or metal tools a structure that would last eight hundred years, whether I would even come close.  At Hovenweep in a period of a little more than a century the ancestral Puebloan people progressed from living in pit houses to building aesthetic muti-tenant structures with sinuous curved walls, serving as shelter, community, and places of sacred reverence, that have now survived nearly a millennium. In this photograph I explore the idea that as we become more industrialized, and therefore distanced from nature, we are less able to see clearly our own birthright, a human culture aligned and integrated with the natural world.