From a master of regional and natural history comes a collection of essays that reveals how the Pacific Northwest shaped the people—and how the people shaped the land
 
Drawing on a range of personal research, author Jack Nisbet engages some of the iconic images in Northwest history: from fossil riches to ice age floods; from the Willamette Meteorite to the 1872 Earthquake; from up-and-down mining cycles to steady rounds of tribal food gathering. Although the scale of time and space in some of the pieces is immense, individual characters still manage to leave their marks; even though the force of modern civilization sometimes seems overwhelming, small places and their key components somehow persevere.

These are the genesis stories of a region. In Ancient Places, Jack Nisbet uncovers touchstones across the Pacific Northwest that reveal the symbiotic relationship of people and place in this corner of the world.