Sixty miles south of Salmon Ruins lies Chaco Canyon--a truly monumental place that has baffled explorers, cowboys, and scholars for over 150 years.
In the 1890s, Richard Wetherill (remember him?) helped lead the first serious excavations in Chaco for the Hyde Exploring Expedition and the Museum of Natural History in New York City. Wetherill eventually stayed at Chaco where he built a home on the north side of Pueblo Bonito and created a trading post for Navajo blankets there, helping to make Navajo blankets a newly sought after commodity in America. Janet and I were undoubtedly the only tourists this day who hiked the path to his grave,
about 300 yards west of Pueblo Bonito, the largest Anasazi building ever. The Navajos had affectionately nicknamed Wetherill "Anasazi" (rather than "blue eyes"--a-not so-kind term for Anglos). Unfortunately, an angry Navajo young man accidentally killed Wetherill in 1910 and government/museum officials trashed him.
Chaco Canyon is in the middle of nowhere--literally. It is a one-mile wide and eight-mile long strip of arid desert
in the middle of waterless desert with no town closer than 21 miles away even today. To get there, the best road requires a drive of 13 miles over rutted roadway, at best graveled, passing perhaps 2 or 3 isolated ranches and Navajo hogans. The forecast called for afternoon thunderstorms, but we were intent on seeing Chaco before we had to make a decision regarding Janet's tooth, which was not improving.
Why bother?--because Chaco was built during Pueblo II times (1020-1150, roughly) and billed itself as the "center of the world" for ancestral Puebloan peoples as far away as southern New Mexico and Blanding, Utah. It started out modestly in Pueblo I times, but by the 1000s Chaco had become the ritual/ceremonial center of the SW. Eventually, 12 Great Houses were built, bigger than anyone could imagine. Pueblo Bonito and Chetro Ketl had around 800 rooms, bigger than any other buildings in North America until the 1880s. There was also a giant, isolated Great Kiva, Casa Rinconada, some 65 feet in diameter that could hold hundreds of people.
Archaeologists found Macaws, copper bells, and other trade items from Mexico. There were pottery and trade items for Puebloan settlements 150 miles in all directions. There were hundreds of miles of roads built; a communications system. And there was Fajada Butte, a strange geological anomaly that could measure the intricate movements of both the sun and the moon, marrying them by means of three upright megalithic rocks that "happen" to be situated just so.
It is an immense, crazy, complicated place that inspires wild speculation and also scholarly astonishment. It makes a great coffee table picture book. I have 226 photos of Chaco landscape and buildings, and we only saw a fraction of what is there.
The first thing one sees approaching Chaco Canyon is Fajada Butte.
No one is allowed near it, although there is a telescope conveniently placed roadside for viewing.
A marker
reveals a few, though not all, of the archaeo-astronomical features of the 3 megaliths near the pinnacle of the butte.
By means of telephoto lensery, I was able to at least locate the three megaliths.
They were first identified in the 1970s and observations have since been verified by computers and by direct observations of solar and lunar phenomena.
The second thing one encounters is the visitor's center. Unlike Mesa Verde, the staff, mostly young Navajo women, were not terribly friendly or helpful. We moved on.
We only had time to visit a few of the great buildings, mostly self-guided. The one ranger-led tour at Pueblo Bonito turned out to be factually erroneous and we finally left the tour.
The "Hungo Pavi" (named in the mid-1800s, meaning unknown) seemed moderately large at first,
than we turned the corner and stared at its immensity.
And this was one of the lesser buildings! The ruins showed the distinctive Chacoan masonry--thin, carefully chiseled and laid sandstone blocks.
Even the windows were carefully laid on the insides.
Behind Hungo Pavi were steps carefully chiseled into the face of the cliff and leading up to one of the roads on the mesa top.
Chetro Ketl was even more immense;
there is simply no way to get the entire building in a photo, even with a wide-angle lens.
It had over 500 rooms reaching four stories in height.
Two great kivas were out front; the excavated one was immense--over 60 feet in diameter.
In the middle of the "E" shaped building was a round "tower" kiva, three stories tall originally.
It was completely enclosed within the main structure itself. A distinctive feature was a "colonnade" that was later filled in, but still looks suspiciously Meso-American.
Pueblo Bonito is the great one
--a little less beautiful, however, after part of the cliff face fell on it in 1941.
It was built in stages over several centuries, but by 1040 in had over 800 rooms and two great kivas,
with an enclosed plaza above the kivas.
A precise north-south aligned wall divided the Great House. The Chaco style of kivas within rooms
and corner openings
(probably involving solar/lunar observations) were all there. We had hoped to climb the trail to the top of the mesa to get a photo of the whole building, but we ran out of time and have not had a chance to return.
As the afternoon wore on, we decided that the one place we could not overlook was Casa Rinconada, the mega-star of all Great Kivas.
It has perfect symmetry and a North-South, East-West crossing alignment within less than 1ยบ of true north and true east. The floor drums and roof supports are, of course, massive. Perhaps four hundred people could fit inside and watch the ceremonial leaders descend from an elevated north room
(like Aztec's Great Kiva). A subterranean passageway underneath this room may have allowed dancers to magically "emerge" in a cloud of smoke in the middle of the ceremonial space.
Did people live in these great houses? A few elite did. But few rooms in Pueblo Bonito or Chetro Ketl had hearths or any signs of human habitation. Obviously, more than a thousand people could have lived in these mansions. But they did not. These were buildings meant to impress pilgrims and meant to represent the power to keep the world in balance. Those who lived in the canyon, lived in small settlements scattered on the other side of the canyon--the slum district.
Were these residents from the other side of the ditch (Chaco wash) in reality the "slaves" of the elite class? Did the elites in the Great Houses cooperate with one another; or were they rivals? Inquiring minds want to know.
We left Chaco before sunset because clouds had begun to roll in. As we got to the last mile of the slick unpaved road, the heavens opened up. Timing is everything. Thanks Chaco.
The next day, the huge storm from Nevada swept through northern New Mexico. We were already headed back to Cortez.
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