Chaco Canyon - Pueblo Bonito

After our break at the Visitor's Center (it's air conditioned!) and a lunch of peanut butter and jelly on English muffins (why does PB&J taste so good on vacation?), we set out to explore the largest Great House in the Southwest, Pueblo Bonito. Built in stages beginning around around 919 AD, Pueblo Bonito may have contained as many as 800 rooms, though at its peak no more than 600 were in use. In places this complex was five stories tall! In addition, the central courtyard included two great kivas and 37 smaller kivas.

What really surprised us about Pueblo Bonito was the ability to wander around inside of it - no barriers or velvet ropes here. Just come right in! Walking through the rooms is an amazing experience. Since only one level is visible - upper stories and floors/ceilings have collapsed - you have to look carefully to discern room heights. What looks like a modern two story foyer might actually be three levels of rooms. And what looks like an interior window is really a small door. These were very small people, and traversing from room to room can lead to cracked heads and elbows. Note in the foreground of the second photo the presence of a "T" door, a staple of Ancestral Puebloan surface and cliff dwellings. Their design has been attributed to everything from religious significance to a practical design when carrying burdens through the door (narrow for the legs, wider for the arms and shoulders).

Another thing that is hard to fathom in these ruins is the presence of thousand year-old wood. You can see it in the upper left in the photo above, as well as below. This gives you an indication of just how dry it is out here. Everything is so dessicated that they are still finding thousand year-old baskets and turkey feather blankets; in addition, the burial sites often yielded mummified remains. For this Easterner, where everything rots due to the humidity, it's amazing to see things so totally preserved. The wood is actually the most valuable item to the archaeologists out here - by analyzing core samples, they can very accurately date the building cycles for these and other ruins.

 

We were also fascinated by the corner doors, visible in the center below (keep in mind that the interior floors/ceilings are missing). We saw several of these, and they seem very curious to us. Why go to the trouble? Where did they lead? I'm guessing they may have been an efficient way to connect a complex of 600-800 rooms without wasting space on corridors.

As special and magical as Pueblo Bonito is - and there was/is something amazing going on here - it's too much to take in at one time. After spending most of our vacation searching for individual ruins in canyon walls, here was an 800 room village right before our eyes. I really couldn't process it all, so we spent a little bit of time visiting two other Great Houses before succumbing to the heat and returning to our campsite for some R&R.

Comments

[J]

Lekson says that very elaborate and rich burials, of what he thinks were "kings", were found in Pueblo Bonito. Are those on view in the Visitor Center there? Supposedly thousands of turquoise beads, etc. Very rich and sumptuous.

[J]

See: http://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/pub/1076.php?from=79601

[John]

Thanks, Janet. Lekson and Childs both refer to the elaborate burials and the tons of turquoise beads, pottery and ceremonial items that were found at Chaco. Unfortunately, like most artifacts discovered at Southwest archaeological sites, many were spirited away to museums, often in the East (or looted by pothunters). The real tragedy is how much of this history is stuck in the catacombs of museums, unavailable for public viewing.

That said, the small museum at Chaco is wonderful. Marie and I both enjoyed the range of tools, pottery, beads, etc that were on display. (But alas, no trace of the burials.) The entire Chaco Museum Collection, containing approximately one million artifacts from over 120 sites in Chaco Canyon and the surrounding region, can be viewed online at http://www.nps.gov/history/museum/exhibits/chcu/index1.html