Although I don't often post about trips outside my area (Berkshire County, Massachusetts, and nearby) I had such a wonderful time on this Road Scholar trip to Flagstaff, AZ, and Gallop, NM, that I wanted to share.
For a long time I have wondered about the cultures and settlements of Native Americans in the Southwest. I loved learning more about them.
Chaco Canyon is a National Historical Park in New Mexico, and also a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987. It preserves a major center of ancestral Puebloan culture dating between 850 and 1250 CE. You can find a timeline of the history on the park website.
While there likely was habitation in the canyon many years earlier, the Great Houses, large constructions with up to 700 rooms, that we visited were built by the ancient Chacoan people who used them from about 850 AD to 1250 AD. Not much definitive information is known about the buildings. Why did people gather there? Did people live there seasonally or year-round?
It has been determined by a process called dendrochronology, that from 1150-1250, people stopped constructing Great House sites and began migrating to other locations. These are the people who become the Pueblo Peoples of New Mexico and the Hopi of Arizona, and many maintain their connections with Chaco Canyon today. Did they leave because of years of drought? Or were there other reasons?
More information is on the UNESCO World Heritage website.
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| The walls are constructed of sandstone rock cut to various sizes with mortar inbetween. |
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| All the remains of walls pictured here, are from one structure. |
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| From a park display, here is a painting of the way the large area with structures might have looked. |
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| You get a little more of an idea of how the layers of the buildings were arranged. |
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| Here's a panorama of the largest Kiva which, it is thought, was used in ceremonys. |
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| Looking through a window to rooms beyond. It is very carefully constructed. |
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| Up to five stories were here originally. You can also see the cliff in the background. |