Chaco Culture

Chaco Culture preserves the heart of one of North America's most advanced ancient civilizations. For more than three centuries, from around 850 to 1150 CE, Chaco Canyon in remote New Mexico was the ceremonial and political center of the Ancestral Puebloan world — a place of monumental 'great houses,' precise astronomical alignments, and a vast network of engineered roads. Its scale and sophistication, achieved without metal tools or the wheel, make Chaco one of the most remarkable archaeological sites in the Americas.

Beginning around 850 CE, the Ancestral Puebloans made Chaco Canyon, in the high desert of northwestern New Mexico, the hub of a civilization that spread across the San Juan Basin. Over the next three hundred years they built a series of monumental 'great houses' — massive, multi-story buildings of shaped sandstone, planned and constructed with striking precision using only stone tools and timber hauled from distant mountains.

The greatest of these, Pueblo Bonito, grew over generations into a D-shaped complex of perhaps 600 to 800 rooms rising four or five stories, with dozens of round ceremonial chambers called kivas. Chaco's builders aligned their structures to the cycles of the sun and moon, and a famous 'Sun Dagger' on nearby Fajada Butte marked the solstices. Wide, remarkably straight roads radiated from the canyon for miles, linking Chaco to scores of outlying communities.

Chaco was less a crowded city than a ceremonial and administrative center, drawing people and goods — turquoise, timber, even macaws from Mesoamerica — from across the region. In the mid-1100s, amid a prolonged drought, the Chacoan world declined and its people dispersed, moving to new communities. Their descendants include the modern Pueblo peoples. The canyon is preserved today as Chaco Culture National Historical Park and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.