Chaco Canyon

Chaco Canyon lies in the high desert of northwestern New Mexico and preserves the monumental remains of the Ancestral Puebloan civilization, which flourished there between roughly the ninth and twelfth centuries AD as a major center of ceremony, trade and astronomical observation. Its most prominent structure, Pueblo Bonito, was a multi-story great house of hundreds of interconnected rooms built around open plazas and enclosed kivas, one of several great houses linked across the wider region by an extensive network of engineered roads. The alignment of several buildings and rock art panels with solar and lunar cycles has made the site a focus of study in archaeoastronomy, and its builders accomplished this monumental construction without draft animals, metal tools or wheeled transport. UNESCO inscribed Chaco Culture National Historical Park as a World Heritage Site in 1987.