The Story: When Jim Chee discovers grave robbers at an ancient burial site, his search for the truth takes him deep into the past. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn searches for a noted woman anthropologist who has vanished, a quest that leads to a moonlit Indian ruin where “thieves of time” have ravaged sacred ground for profit. The story unfolds with a string of discoveries that involve a father’s love, greed, jealousy, and murder—all against the backdrop of a real-life mystery, the fate of the people who once lived at Chaco Canyon. Settings also include the scenic San Juan River canyon country.
Of Interest: A Thief of Time was the first Hillerman novel to become a New York Times best seller. The novel won a Macavity Award from Mystery Readers International and received nominations for Edgar and Anthony awards. The U.S. Department of the Interior and the American Anthropology Association honored Hillerman for the book because of its message about the damage pot hunting does to the archaeological record. He also received the Center for the American Indian’s Ambassador Award, which remained on display in his office for more than thirty years—a beautiful bronze of a Comanche warrior holding his coup stick. In 2000, the Independent Mystery Booksellers selected A Thief of Time as one of the 100 Favorite Mysteries of the Century. PBS filmed it as an American Mystery!, the third in the series based on Hillerman’s Navajo police officers.
Tony Hillerman’s Comments: Hillerman once said that A Thief of Time was his favorite book in the Chee/Leaphorn series because here, he believed, all the pieces of the plot came together smoothly for the first time.
“Oddly enough, I got the idea for A Thief of Time from seeing this Bureau of Land Management poster. It had a sinister looking fellow with dark glasses. I remember the headline, THIEF OF TIME. The message here was obvious—this guy is not only stealing artifacts, he’s stealing our ability to learn about our past. I saw that and I thought, ‘Wow, what a great title for a book.’”
In Seldom Disappointed he wrote about reasons for the book’s popularity, sharing what he learned from readers at book signings. “They’d assure me they were not mystery readers. They read my books because of the tribal cultural material intermixed with the plot line. They wanted to learn a bit about American Indians. It occurred to me that I had tapped into a mass of American readers who suffer from the same workaholic problem that besets me. Reading for idle amusement left them feeling guilty. My books, like a sausage sandwich spiced with antacid tablets, give absolution along with the sin.”
Chaco Canyon, despite its remote location, attracts some 80,000 visitors annually.
CHACO CANYON
Beyond him, the slanted light of the autumn afternoon outlined the contours of the Chaco Plateau with lines of darkness. The shadow of Fajada Butte stretched all the way across Chaco Wash now. Outside the shadow, the yellow of the cottonwood along the dry streambed glittered in the sun. They were the only trees in a tan-gray-silver universe of grass. (Where had they found their firewood, Leaphorn wondered, the vanished thousands of Old Ones who built these huge stone apartments?…)
[CHAPTER 2]
ABOUT CHACO CULTURE NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK
The combination of open space and human effort makes Chaco Canyon one of the world’s special places. Dad wasn’t alone in his love of this hard-to-get-to destination. Despite its location, Chaco draws thousands of visitors from all over the world. New Mexico’s Pueblo Indians and the Hopi of Arizona place the Chacoans among their ancestors and consider this part of their homeland.
The National Park Service established Chaco Canyon National Monument in 1907, some twenty years after a pair of cowboys discovered these extensive ruins in arid northwestern New Mexico. Chaco Culture National Historical Park became a United Nations World Heritage Site in 1987. Encompassing fifty-three square miles, the park preserves a key center of ancient Native American culture. Indians lived here for about 400 years, beginning around the same time Vikings sacked Canterbury Cathedral and Muslims invaded Rome.
Pueblo Bonito, one of the canyon’s great structures, includes 37 kivas.
Despite more than a century of archaeological research, the park has thousands of unexcavated sites and scores of unsolved mysteries—an ideal setting for A Thief of Time. Since the builders left no written language, archaeologists have to puzzle out the mystery of these great cities. Why did people settle in this desolate place? What compelled them to haul logs from the mountains fifty miles away? Why would a civilization without the wheel or pack animals build more than 200 miles of straight, wide roads? What rituals transpired in the great kiva? How did astronomy influence Chaco’s daily life? Why did they walk away from the amazing stone buildings they had spent decades meticulously constructing?
Mom and Dad once brought some German visitors here. Dad recalled how they marveled at the ruins, but after a few hours insisted that he drive them back to Albuquerque. “They were used to green, used to trees,” he told me. “They loved Pueblo Bonito but all that empty space, well, it made them very uneasy.”
When Don and I camped here, we noticed scores of bats emerging from the ruins at sunset, a surprise because I hadn’t seen any insects, their favorite food. Later, the stupendously dark night sky blazed with a million stars.
ROCK ART
A great place for pictographs. Just ahead, beyond the cottonwoods on the sheer sandstone wall where the canyon bottom bent, was a gallery of them. The baseball gallery, they called it, because of the great shaman figure that someone had thought resembled a cartoon version of an umpire…Above it, a clutter of shapes danced, stick figures, abstractions: the inevitable Kokopelli, his humped shape bent, his flute pointed almost at the ground; a heron flying; a heron standing; the zigzag band of pigment representing a snake.
[CHAPTER 1]
The petroglyphs were exactly as she had stored them in her mind. The spiral that might represent the sipapu from which humans had emerged from the womb of Mother Earth, the line of dots that might represent the clan’s migrations, the wide-shouldered forms that ethnographers believed represented kachina spirits. There, too, cut through the dark desert varnish into the face of the cliff, was the shape Eddie had called Big Chief looking out from behind a red-stained shield, and a figure that seemed to have a man’s body but the feet and head of a heron.
[CHAPTER 1]
ABOUT PICTOGRAPHS AND PETROGLYPHS
New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah have thousands of examples of ancient rock art left by the Pueblo Indian ancestors and many other Native Americans. To my eye, some seem whimsical; some tell a story; some make me wonder. One of the largest concentrations of petroglyphs lies along the San Juan River at Butler Wash, Utah, an area similar to that featured in A Thief of Time.
Petroglyphs from Monument Valley
Petroglyphs at Flute Player Cave, Canyon de Chelly
Early artists created pictographs by painting on rock with a mineral or vegetable dye and a binder such as blood or fat. Paintings in locations protected from rain and sun can survive the ravages of time. To make petroglyphs, artists carved, pecked, or chipped into stone, removing an outer patina to expose the lighter-colored rock beneath. They often used sandstone and basalt for petroglyphs. Common symbols include serpents, birds, antelope, deer, the sun and moon, human stick figures, and Kokopelli, the humpbacked flute player. Look for petroglyphs and pictographs near ruins, in caves, and beneath overhangs.
Among my favorites are the dozens of red hand-prints of different sizes painted outside pueblo ruins in Monument Valley. I imagine children pestering their parents to trace their little hands…or doing it themselves! It’s tempting to follow the old patterns with your fingertips, but please resist. Touching the rock art hastens its deterioration.
In A Thief of Time, Dad used distinctive petroglyphs as the sign Leaphorn needs to realize he’s close to finding the missing archaeologist.
The San Juan River with Monument Valley on the horizon
SAN JUAN RIVER
The cliffs that walled in the San Juan between Bluff and Mexican Hat limited takeout places to a few sandy benches and the mouths of perhaps a score of washes and canyons…About four miles below the Bluff bridge, he let the kayak drift into a sandbar on the north side of the river, as much to stretch cramping muscles and give himself a rest as in any hope of finding something. On the cliffs here he found an array of petroglyphs cut through the black desert varnish into the sandstone. He studied a row of square-shouldered figures with chevron-like stripes above their heads and little arcs suggesting sound waves issuing from their mouths.
[CHAPTER 18]
ABOUT THE SAN JUAN RIVER
The San Juan, flowing through Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico, is one of the major rivers of the Southwest. Traditional Navajos hold the river itself and several of its confluences with other rivers sacred. Rafters enjoy the section between Bluff and Mexican Hat, Utah, because of the many petroglyphs and ancient Indian ruins along the way.
When Don and I did a San Juan float trip here years ago, we unknowingly booked with the same company and the same guide Dad had used in his research for a magazine article. That river experience later became part of A Thief of Time. Dad charmed fellow passengers with his stories, our guide recalled, and the journey with “famous author Tony Hillerman” became the most memorable of his hundreds of trips down the river.
The San Juan near Farmington, New Mexico
Petroglyphs from Canyon de Chelly