Cave Paintings of Baja California

Crosby spent a large part of the 1960s and 1970s doggedly ferreting out prehistoric rock art sites in the mid-peninsula region of Baja. This complete revision of a shorter work first published in 1975 reveals that it was not only a labor of love, but perhaps an obsession as well. Produced by an as-yet-unknown culture Crosby quaintly calls ""The Painters,"" these cave paintings are stunning pictographs that rival the finest rock art and cave paintings in the world. But the text is a plodding, repetitious litany of every back country foray he undertook for some 20 years to discover those neglected sites. Not until the last chapter, ""The Practices and Puzzles of the Painters,"" do we receive anything approaching speculation as to who it was that created these marvelous images. Crosby seems too interested in explaining the difficulty in reaching every cave and how disappointed he was by the woefully deteriorated condition of many of the murals. The photographs, too, tend to be similarly weighted toward the process rather than the outcome: too many of the 71 color photos are given over to man-with-mural, where mural alone might have been clearer. Without better pictures, or more thorough analysis of findings, this book becomes a sort of unsatisfying anthropological travelogue. 11 b&w photos; 108 color illustrations. (Feb.)