When you start looking, you see the potsherds everywhere–bits and pieces of the long-ago, scattered throughout the pinyon-juniper forest, standing out in the black volcanic sand like coins on a city street.

At the edge of this dry mesa north of Flagstaff you can find pottery fragments in a wild array of colors and styles: Brick-red, slate-grey, cream-colored, black-on-white, black-on-red. The worked clay is smooth-surfaced, coiled or scalloped, sometimes randomly imprinted by human fingertips.

For two days I’ve been taking long walks along Deadman Wash, considering the people who made the shattered ceramics at my feet. I come out to this ragged, wooded gash in the mesa at least once a year, when the noise and ugliness of 21st century life gets me down. I camp in the forest, or in the bright desert below, and try to imagine the lives of the people who once lived here. Sometimes I envy them.

I like grocery stores and modern dentistry as much as the next person, but our fossil-fueled, commodified and digitized way of life wearies me. Everything moves too fast. There are too many of us. Our technologies lay waste to the earth and divide us from one another.

The pot makers’ lives were far from ideal–much shorter than ours, and more physically demanding. But they breathed cleaner air, and their communities were far stronger. They never worried about climate change or chemical warfare or identity theft. They didn’t carry a world-full of bad news in their pockets. Were they happier than we are? Who knows.

Most of the potters’ stories are lost to the ages. But just a mile or two down the wash, at Wupatki National  Moniment, you can learn a few things about them. (Better hurry, though: The busy folks at DOGE have plans for our NPS visitor centers–here in Arizona and across the whole park system.)

While it’s open, though, the Wupatki visitor center offers a vivid glimpse of Puebloan culture. Perhaps two thousand people lived near Wupatki in the 12th century–growing corn and other crops, hunting and gathering, trading with travelers from as far west as the Pacific Coast, and as far south as present-day Central America.

The park encompasses a sliver of this high mesa and a good-sized chunk of stony, arid land at the low end of Deadman Wash. To the north and east, the incomparable Painted Desert spreads out for thousands of square miles.

Wupatki was established a century ago to protect a handful of spectacular pueblos–archaic, multi-story dwellings with up to 100 rooms. But less-showy ruins are easy to find just outside the park. Visit any prominence along Deadman Wash and you’re likely to find the stone foundation of a pit house built in the 11th or 12th century. My camper is parked next to one.

Parks like Wupatki, Mesa Verde and Canyon de Chelly preserve the greatest architecture of early Pueblo cultures. But across the Southwest, wherever there was water, there were people. Archaeologists estimate that upwards of 100,000 pueblo dwellers inhabited the region at the turn of the 12th century.

(Indigenous people still live here, of course, and indigenous cultures thrive: More than a dozen tribes reside within sight of the snow-crowned San Francisco Peaks, that dominate the skyline just south of Wupatki.)

The Peaks marked a crossroad for prehistoric traders, which may account for Wupatki’s early success. Several dry-land farming cultures converged here late in the 11th century, after the eruption of the volcano now known as Sunset Crater. The ash and cinders created a mulch that improved farming conditions by trapping soil moisture.

But Wupatki thrived for less than two centuries before its residents moved on. Archaeologists and the peoples’ descendants–the nearby Hopi and Zuni tribes–have varying explanations for where they went, and why.

Their half-fallen houses remain. Built from local stone and clay, attached to cliffs or other rock formations, they seem to grow out of the land, possessing an organic beauty that’s hard to find in modern architecture.

Or in modern life.

Urban dwellings are far more comfortable than pit houses. Modern vehicles speed us to practically anywhere, and our refrigerators are full. Digital devices give us godlike powers. But at what cost?

The ancient builders had a constant, direct connection to the land. We in the 21st century, are surrounded by our own creations. Year after year I’ve come out to Wupatki, where the deep past is visible at every turn. I’m drawn by the peace and natural beauty but also by an abiding sense of loss, and a craving for reconnection with the land.

Twenty years ago I thought seriously about setting up a long-term camp (squatting, that is) on this mesa. I imagined building a brush house and staying for a season or two. (It would not have been too great a leap; the derelict trailer I lived in back then was hardly more than a brush house, with plenty of leaks and several active bird-nests.

But that was then. These days I own a tighter house and love its creature comforts. I’ve gotten soft: Last night I considered sleeping on the ground so I could enjoy the star-show over Wupatki, but the wind blew hard so I opted for the camper.

A few hours before dawn, though, I woke to find that the wind had died. I dragged my sleeping bag outside, then lay on the ground and stared into the shimmering night sky. A coyote pierced the darkness with its wild, wavering song. I felt a deep joy.