Chaco Canyon
Great houses of a thousand rooms rise in a desert canyon, connected by straight roads.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 300 years
- Known to
- ± 30 years
- Era
- Post-Classical, Holocene
From around 850 CE Ancestral Puebloan builders raise multi-storey masonry complexes in Chaco Canyon — Pueblo Bonito has over 600 rooms — using 200,000 timbers hauled from mountains up to 80 kilometres away. Arrow-straight roads radiate outward for tens of kilometres, and several structures align on solar and lunar cycles. The canyon has poor water and thin soil, so what it was for remains argued: ceremonial centre, redistribution hub, or both.