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Published: November 29th 2012
Pueblo Bonito
A tiny portion of Pueblo Bonito at Chaco Canyon, the largest pueblo ruin in North AmericaPeople visit the pueblo ruins of the southwest for many reasons.
Some want to
explore the history while others
seek pretty pictures, and almost everything in between.
Like few other sites,
Chaco Canyon divides the history seekers from everyone else.
Getting there requires a
difficult drive on dirt roads; to a canyon that is wide, low, and decidedly unphotogenic.
Chaco would be a mere footnote in this landscape except that it contains
ruins on a scale found nowhere else.
They attract knowledgeable visitors like an ancient El Dorado.
From the moment I planned this trip, I knew I had to make it there.
The rain gods have thwarted me twice so far, but not today, finally!
Chaco Canyon
Heading west from Cuba, the paved road passes through an empty landscape of desert, low hills, and long views.
About the only notable thing is a large white tent holding a Native American casino.
A long way from anywhere, the sign for Chaco Canyon finally appears.
It warns about the long drive on dirt ahead, and the lack of facilities.
It also warns that the only source of lodging anywhere near the canyon is a single campground that fills quickly in summer.
Fajada Butte
Prominent Butte in Chaco Canyon, home to ancient solar observatories. Soon after the turnoff, the road turns to dirt.
The surface is rutted from the rain yesterday otherwise it’s in decent shape.
The surrounding landscape is rolling desert hills.
This area is as profoundly empty as the road to Horseshoe Canyon (see
Indiana Jones Meets Southern Utah), and about as dangerous if something goes wrong.
The path climbs a ridge and forks.
The sign for Chaco Canyon points to the west.
The roadway follows the top of the ridge for a while, with long views of the empty landscape.
It then reaches a wide and shallow depression with a butte in the far distance.
The depression marks Chaco Wash.
Many desert wash crossings have signs to not enter if flooded.
This one has a sign warning to not enter if it’s wet.
The crossing becomes a muddy car trap in the rain.
The force of the current can also sweep cars away.
Thankfully, today the soil was dry and hard.
After the wash, the road enters a wide shallow canyon, heading for the butte.
It finally gets close at the
Una Vida
Portion of the remains of Una Vida, one of the smaller Great Houses main portion of Chaco Canyon.
Just before the butte, the road passes a ruin in an alcove with a campground in front of it, Wijiji.
At the park entrance, the highway surface turns to pavement.
It’s yet another example of the craziness of government spending around here; the roads within the park, managed by the park service, are paved; while the roads TO the park are not!
Nobody knows exactly why its ancient inhabitants decided to settle here; Chaco Canyon is low and rocky, and often completely dry.
Whatever their reasons, a thousand years ago ancestral puebloans turned this canyon into the most sophisticated society ever in North America prior to European contact.
Over a three hundred year occupation, the canyon became
the center of a vast trading empire that reached from California to the Great Plains, and Utah to northern Mexico.
Inhabitants filled the canyon with pueblos and other settlements.
Six of them, the
Great Houses along the northern canyon wall, are the largest and best engineered structures pueblo society ever built.
The centerpiece, Pueblo Bonito, is the largest all masonry structure ever built in North America and the largest of any type until the
Chaco masonry
Closeup of Chaco masonry at Una Vida: precisely cut large rocks alternating with bands of smaller ones, which give the walls extra strength invention of the skyscraper.
Chaco Canyon residents were clever scientists in addition to organizers and engineers.
They set up a series of structures to
observe the sun and predict the seasons.
This information is crucial for managing crop cycles.
The most famous structure, the
Sun Dagger, sits on top of the butte in front of the canyon, Fajada Butte.
It contains a series of precisely laid rocks that cause shafts of light to touch various pictographs.
Part of the Solar Marker at Edge of the Cedars State Park (see
Cedar Mesa: Southeast Utah’s Wonderland) is based on it.
Unfortunately, enough people visited that the rocks shifted and the Sun Dagger no longer works properly.
All such artifacts are now closed to casual visitors.
Una Vida
Una Vida is the first Great House passed after entering the canyon proper.
From a distance it looks like a large pile of small rocks, much like other pueblo ruins.
A hiking trail goes through it, where the scope of ancient achievement becomes apparent.
Only some of the walls still stand high enough to be seen from a distance.
With all visible, the pueblo is larger
Pueblo Bonito
Another view of the incredible size of Pueblo Bonito than any I have seen so far, although Aztec comes close (see
Rocky Mountain Highs).
The pueblo has the same semi-circle layout as Aztec.
The curved portion is the plaza.
It contains a large round depression, a great kiva of the type restored at Aztec.
The rest of the pueblo looks like Aztec on a larger scale, with multiple stories of rooms surrounding the plaza.
Holes between rooms let in air.
Close up, the
masonry here has a sophistication found nowhere else.
Instead of rough blocks held together with mortar, these are precisely cut and fitted.
Big blocks with no mortar alternate with bands of little rocks.
Alternating the size of the rocks like this strengthened the walls, so the builders could make them higher.
The lower walls are thick, to support the weight of the walls above.
Some of the walls have round holes, the location of former tree branches used to hold up ceilings.
The incredible engineering continues to the layout.
The flat wall of the pueblo is aligned almost perfectly east west.
Looking from the
Pueblo Bonito Plaza
A small portion of the plaza in the center of Pueblo Bonito, showing one of the great kivas with two smaller ones behind pueblo down the canyon also shows that it is also perfectly aligned in a line with every other Great House but one.
Ancient residents needed highly sophisticated tools and skill to create this place; seeing it all close up feels thrilling.
Pueblo Bonito
After Una Vida, I saw
Pueblo Bonito, the largest pueblo of them all.
It contains thousands of rooms around an elevated central plaza, which holds dozens of great kivas.
The tallest parts contain at least five stories.
The entire structure is laid out as a semi-circle, with the flat edge
precisely aligned east-west.
It’s also precisely aligned in a line with five of the other great houses.
The canyon’s inhabitants required over three centuries to finish building it.
Simply put, it’s the most impressive ancient ruin in the entire southwest.
The parking lot shows a view of enormous stone walls in the distance, next to a huge pile of sandstone rubble.
The walls have precisely aligned doorways, including the corner doorways unique to Chaco Canyon architecture.
The trail heads for and climbs the rubble, which overlaps part of the pueblo.
Precision engineering
Pueblo Bonito's famous (and often photographed) precisely aligned doorways The rubble is the remains of a
large sandstone slab called ‘threatening rock’.
Pueblo Bonito is located close to the canyon wall.
The wall contains vertical grooves, some of which reach to the canyon floor.
One of those grooves separated a wide and tall (97 by 140 feet!) but thin slab of sandstone from the wall proper.
In old photos it looks like it could collapse at any moment.
Thanks to the need for precise alignment, its builders sited Pueblo Bonito near the slab anyway.
The rock finally fell in 1941, destroying several dozen rooms of the pueblo.
The building is so large the damage looks minor.
The trail climbs the rubble pile to reach an overlook of the entire pueblo.
From here, the
gigantic size is fully apparent.
All of the pueblos of Mesa Verde (see
Ancient Civilization) combined would fit inside this one.
It’s large enough to make Una Vida seem small.
Tier after tier of rooms surrounds an elevated central plaza, which contains a dozen open round chambers.
After the overlook, the trail follows the back wall.
For the
Solar doorway
Diagonal doorway at Pueblo Bonito, exactly aligned so the sun shines through at the winter solstice most part, it’s a long featureless surface of precisely laid stones.
Round holes appear in places, the former location of trees used to hold up room ceilings.
It also has small square openings designed as air vents.
The wall also has much rougher openings low to the ground; these were made by ranchers in the late 1800s that used the pueblo as a cattle pen.
The path reaches a part where the walls fell in, and passes through the gap past multiple rooms.
Like other pueblos, they are small and claustrophobic.
Clearly, ancient puebloans were comfortable in tight spaces.
The trail then enters the plaza.
A huge arc of rooms appears behind.
Parts of the walls have logs sticking out, the remains of former ceilings.
Unlike Una Vida, big parts of this pueblo are fenced off to prevent damage.
The plaza contains a number of great kivas, of the type restored at Aztec.
All of them have missing roofs.
Looking in from above shows the same layout as the one at Aztec, two rectangular stone pits surrounding a central
Chetro Ketl
Chetro Ketl, the second largest pueblo in Chaco Canyon depression.
Modern archeologists believe that Pueblo Bonito was built mainly for ceremonies and trade rather than living.
They have found little evidence that people lived in most of the rooms, such as fire pits.
Instead, the place was filled with the remains of pottery and trade goods.
Some rooms also only open to the outside, rather than the plaza, and have remains of built in shelves.
The path then enters a large number of rooms.
Unlike Aztec, the Park Service routed the path through rooms where the upper levels have fallen in, so all are filled with light and air.
They are still a tight fit, and passing through the low doorways required ducking and scrambling.
A few rooms are located next to ones with upper stories intact.
Ducking in shows how the ceilings were made.
The builders inserted logs into holes in the walls and covered the logs with branches.
Layers of mud were then put on top to create an adobe floor.
Some of the logs have little dots on them, places where archeologists
Mesoamerican masonry
Small columns like this are unique to Chetro Ketl in the southwest. The design came from the Toltec culture in Mexico. took core samples.
By carbon dating the logs, they figured out how the pueblo was laid out and when different parts were built.
One room now contains a precious artifact, a stone slab with a deep groove.
It’s an ancient grindstone, used to turn corn into flour.
Workers placed the grain in the groove and then manually moved a heavy stone over it.
This particular grindstone was placed by the park service.
Near the end, the trail passes through another example of the incredible design skill of Chaco Canyon’s builders.
A set of rooms contains precisely aligned doorways, each one framing the next.
They are modern visitors’ favorite photograph.
Pueblo Bonito, like most Chaco Canyon pueblos, contains doorways that pass through room corners.
They are a curious design element, because they weaken the integrity of the walls.
Some I saw were reinforced with logs above.
Archeologists have no definitive ideas why they were included, but they do have some fascinating insights.
One doorway near the end of the trail, for example, contains a rock slab
Richard Wetherill gravesite
Grave of the man considered both the most important early archeologist and the most prolific looter in the history of the Southwest. underneath it.
On the winter solstice, the sun shines directly through the doorway onto the slab.
The park now has a special event each year to view it.
For many visitors, Pueblo Bonito is fulfilling enough for a Chaco Canyon visit.
Seeing ruin after ruin quickly becomes repetitive.
Anyone who likes ancient history or technology, on the other hand, could spend days here.
Chaco Canyon shows ancient pueblo society at its height.
I fall in the latter category, so I kept hiking.
Chetro Ketl
Chetro Ketl, the second largest of the great houses, sits near Pueblo Bonito.
It’s roughly two thirds the size and is shaped like a flattened arch.
Like Pueblo Bonito, the central plaza holds several great kivas.
Uniquely, the pueblo sits on a large earthen mound, which archeologists believe was built to prevent flooding.
The hiking trail only visits open rooms on the top levels of the pueblo.
Archeologists found fossilized macaw feathers in some of those rooms, which were highly prized for decoration and garments.
The birds can’t survive in this climate, so
Pueblo del Arroyo
The only pueblo along Chaco Wash instead of the canyon wall they had to come from Toltec tribes in what is now Mexico.
Chaco Canyon’s trade empire stretched a long way.
The pueblo has two unusual architectural features.
Several walls contain
thin columns with precisely laid stones, with much rougher stones between them.
The next closest ancient structures with this design are in Mexico, indicating ideas moved along the trade routes as well as goods.
The back wall of the pueblo contains a long line of small round holes.
They once held logs, which in turn supported a balcony.
It’s the only one found in Chaco Canyon.
Chetro Ketl sits close to the mouth of a side canyon.
During every thunderstorm, water from this canyon used to flood the ruin.
The park service built an earthen dam in the 1950s to divert the floods.
While doing so, they discovered again the engineering skill of the original inhabitants; the dam sits on the foundation of an ancient dam that did the exact same thing.
On the far side of Pueblo Bonito, a short trail leads to a graveyard surrounded by a fence.
Precise design
More preciosely aligned rooms and doorways at Pueblo del Arroyo It holds the remains of one of the most important people in southwest archeology,
Richard Wetherill.
In the late 1800s, he searched for and discovered ancient ruins throughout the Southwest, including most of the largest ever found.
He discovered Chaco Canyon in 1898.
To modern archeologists he is both angel and devil.
By the standards of his own time, he was incredibly conscientious and through about his work, carefully excavating and documenting what he found.
By the standards of ours, he was one of the most prolific looters in history, selling every artifact he discovered to museums and collectors across the United States.
Richard Wetherill is buried here because he died in the canyon.
Ironically, it wasn’t related to his exploring work.
Wetherill also grazed cattle.
While ranching in Chaco Canyon in 1910, he got into a fierce dispute with a local Navajo, Chris-Chilling Begay, who
retaliated by killing him.
Pueblo del Arroyo
Pueblo del Arroyo is the only great house not located along the canyon wall.
It sits in the middle of the canyon next to Chaco Wash.
It has the familiar layout of tiers of rooms arranged
Corn grinding room
Recreated corn grinding room at Pueblo del Arroyo in a semi-circle around a plaza containing kivas.
Uniquely, the flat wall at the end of the plaza runs north-south instead of east-west.
In front of this wall sit a set of concentric circular walls, which archeologists believe were another kiva.
This is also unique to Pueblo del Arroyo.
The rooms of this pueblo demonstrate more incredible engineering skill.
The doorways of many are precisely aligned, layer after layer.
In a few spots, the doorways line up all the way through the pueblo so they show blue sky (visitors can’t enter them, though).
Unusually, this pueblo has T shaped doorways in some places.
Found in many pueblo ruins, such as at Mesa Verde, they are fairly rare in Chaco Canyon.
In a series of long thin rooms, archeologists found fossilized corn.
Pueblo inhabitants used these rooms to grind and store corn flour.
One has been recreated with more grinding stones.
All the work was done by hand.
The builders designed the rooms so people could brace their feet against the walls as they worked.
Casa Rinconda
One of the buildings at Casa Rinconda, a support settlement, with Pueblo Bonito in the distance A long room near the plaza holds the fossilized bones of hundreds of birds, mostly macaws.
The birds were all young at the time of death.
As noted above, macaw feathers were highly prized in pueblo cultures.
Archeologists believe that Chaco Canyon residents traded for the birds in northern Mexico, brought them here, and then traded the feathers elsewhere in their empire.
To get the birds, they most likely handed over
turquoise, which they got from miners working north of Albuquerque.
Casa Rinconada
The great houses required a large amount of support to run.
Satellite settlements covering the remainder of the canyon provided it.
One of them sits near the road,
Casa Rinconada.
It contains numerous small structures, with the same precisely cut masonry as the great houses.
The largest contains a dozen rooms and two kivas.
For all of them, only the foundations survive.
The settlement also contains a free standing
great kiva, one of the best preserved in Chaco Canyon.
It has no roof otherwise it resembles the reconstructed kiva at Aztec almost exactly.
A circular wall containing numerous slots surrounds a large depression containing
Great Kiva
The freestanding great kiva at Casa Rinconda, one of the best preserved in Chaco Canyon. two stone rectangular boxes.
Small stairways sit on either end, precisely lined up with a line drawn between the boxes.
Logs form a ceiling over the stairs.
Chaco Canyon was an essential stop of my trip.
It’s a long difficult drive from anywhere and the canyon by itself will never appear in any pictures, but this simply doesn’t matter.
Chaco Canyon contains the most important archeological sites in the United States.
Seeing this ancient civilization was thrilling.
Pity most of the people clogging more accessible sites like Mesa Verde never will.
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Home and Away
Bob Carlsen
Thus far, the weather has always prevented me from visiting Chaco Canyon...
glad to see if finally improved for you. Maybe someday I'll make it. I attended a lecture by an anthropologist who was an expert on the subject of the Chaco Canyon culture. She said that they laid out the kivas in the pattern of the Plieades constellation, and that many of the tribes in the Southwest also laid out their teepees in the same pattern. Did you hear anything like this when you visited Chaco?