Chaco Canyon

A kid in the tribe said, Tell us a place story.

Down washed out rocky New Mexico roads is another magic place sixty miles from Aztec.

Chaco Canyon is twelve miles long and one mile wide. It is a complex Anasazi Pueblo culture community nation from the mid-800’s A.D. until a fundamental shift left it abandoned around 1115 A.D. due to overused land, a lack of trees, drought, and failing crops according to anthropologists. 

It was the social and economic center of life, an American Cradle of Civilization in the San Juan Basin. A huge wheel of life reflecting the pueblo world view.

They were master builders constructing stone villages and six large pueblos of multiple stories with rooms larger than previously known. They began with simple walls one stone thick using mud, mortar, rubble, and the veneer of facing stones. Later they used large blocks of tabular sandstone chinked with smaller stones set in mortar and later covered with plaster.

The largest of the big houses is Pueblo Bonito (800–1200 A.D.) which is four stories high with 600 rooms and forty kivas. A kiva is a sacred religious area. A kiva is a circular room without windows with a smoke hole at the top where the men of the village would climb down a ladder to sit, smoke, and talk about history and legends.

There was a raised stone bench and reserved for the “Speakers.” Once a year to prepare for the Earth Renewing Ceremony, the Masked God society would whitewash the interior walls of the kiva and repaint the sacred symbols on the interior stone pillars.

Chetro Ketl, 1020 A.D., had 500 rooms and sixteen kivas with a large plaza. Ketl is of great interest because of its great kiva and remnants of carved birds, prayer sticks, arrows, and discs.

Pueblo del Arroyo had 280 rooms and twenty kivas. The Kin Kletso Pueblo, built in two stages around 1125 had one hundred rooms with five enclosed kivas.

Chaco was an advanced social and trading hub. Raw turquoise was imported from distant mines. People made beautiful necklaces, bracelets, and pendants. Seashells, copper bells, and the remains of macaws and parrots suggest they traded with Mexican cultures, perhaps the Toltecs.

Chaco Canyon was a spiritual center for ritual and ceremony as journeys became pilgrimages. They were in direct contact with the elemental life of the cosmos; mountains, cloud, thunder, air, earth, sun. This immediacy allowed them to feel, connect, contact power and mysterious joy.

At one time 10,000 people lived in 400 surrounding settlements. They developed 400 miles of engineered and planned prehistoric roads connecting their communities.