The illustrations provide by Leonard Fisher, in his book Anasazi, are incredible. The images that he used to aid in the telling of this story are simple, nuanced, and realistic. The most striking quality is that he used colors and styles that were indicative of the drawings that were left behind. The choice to use dark red and brown colors gave me a clue that this story would be true to the subject. I liked this picture book and I learned new information about a culture that is difficult to cover. This book provides a chronicle of what we think became of the Anasazi people. Our uncertainty about how valid any of the information about the Anasazi people is due to lack of early settlement remnants and no written history. But, I think Mr. Fisher accounted for this and provided information on how historians came to present day conclusions. This was great insight and was glad that this was explained to the reader.
This book starts before the Anasazi made a settlement and ends with the complete disappearance of the culture, roughly 500-1300. A timeline was included as an access feature and this was effective at allowing me to think about how long a period of time this covered. He went into detail about the different periods and how they evolved from the previous groups. They built non permanent structures, pueblos, and then, most famously, buildings carved into mountains. The artifacts that were distinct in the Anasazi culture were found in Native populations in the surrounding regions. They abandoned their settlements and integrated into other Native groups.
Anasazi meant "ancient ones" or "ancient enemies" in Native languages. We aren't even sure how they were viewed in their own time. Even without a primary source, the story of this civilization has been assembled through deduction and archaeology. This book did a good job of letting me see a culture and understand how information is interpreted through time. ( )

This book was okay. It uses the term Anasazi to refer to ancestral Puebloans, which is not the preferred terminology. It also states that they used, "clumsy wooden spears tipped with stone arrowheads." With the use of atlatls, these spears were anything but clumsy. Neolithic peoples took down mammoths with the same technology. It gives nice information on the structures they built, but that's about it's only redeeming value. ( )

Anasazi by Leonard Everett Fisher is a picture book with longer, multi-paragraph informational sections on each page. The book would likely be most appropriate for a middle school social studies class. The book details the culture, history, and bits of the language of the Anasazi. It also includes information about the construction of pueblos, and the agricultural endeavors of the Anasazi people, and includes brief information about the principal descendants of the Anasazi, including the Hopi, Zuni, Pueblo, and Acoma. ( )

This book is more of a history book about the ancient Navajo tribe called the Anasazi. They lived in the four corners region of the United States. It talks about their society and houses that are still left today, but also how they disappeared but no one knows why.