All Roads Lead to Chaco Canyon
Where will the road to ruins lead you?
By: Bill Markley 11/03/2009
If you don’t come back, there’s something wrong with you.” These words spoken by G.B. Cornucopia, a 20-year veteran U.S. Park Ranger, echo in my head as I gaze down into New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon. Desert winds tugging at my hat threaten to hurl it over the canyon rim.
One thousand years ago Ancient Puebloans were building an inter-connected community, the sacred heart of which now lies in ruins at the Chaco Canyon floor. The road system that connects it to distant outlier pueblos is unique. Nothing like it exists elsewhere in North America. Mapping out the roadways shifted the world’s view of these Southwest American ruins, with UNESCO naming it a World Heritage Site in 1987, elevating Chaco Canyon to the level of Peru’s ancient ruins, Machu Picchu, of France’s Palace of Versailles and of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.
Who were these people, and what was the significance of these buildings they had left behind? The Four Corners region is more than just a place where a Tony Hillerman mystery unfolds; on the roads to the ruins of Chaco Canyon, archaeologists and observant adventurers continue to uncover the secrets of this advanced civilization.
Chacoan Culture
Dubbed “Anasazi” by archaeologist A.V. Kidder in 1936, the Chaco people today are referred to as Ancestral Puebloans. Modern Pueblo tribes do not appreciate the slur of the Navajo word Anasazi, which means “ancient enemy.” Richard Wetherill first applied this term to these people when he “discovered” Colorado’s Mesa Verde ruins after collecting stray cattle in December 1888. The Navajo homeland Dinetah is northeast of Chaco Canyon, and the Navajo actually sheltered the Ancestral Puebloans when the Spanish re-conquered the region in 1692. The tribes inter-married and had other cultural interactions, so it is not likely that Kidder intended the slur when he adopted Wetherill’s term.
The Ancestral Puebloans built 13 sandstone block, multi-storied Great Houses on the floor of the canyon and the smaller Pueblo Alto complex above the canyon’s north rim. Chaco Canyon flourished from AD 850 to 1250 when drought apparently led the Ancestral Puebloans to abandon the region. They moved away and settled to the west and to the south, becoming part of the modern Pueblo people of the Southwest United States. Pueblo people have oral histories about coming from Chaco Canyon, and, to this day, they make pilgrimages to ancient sites in the Chaco Canyon region.
Ancestral Puebloans made turquoise jewelry, pottery and fabrics, trading them with neighboring and distant communities for a wide variety of goods including exotic items such as seashells, copper bells, parrots and macaws. They extended their culture in all directions from Chaco Canyon to outlier pueblos that mirror Chaco’s architecture such as Lowry, Salmon and the misnamed Aztec Ruins, with the Southwest’s only reconstructed kiva (also called estufa) that visitors can walk through. “We don’t really know what went on here,” Ranger Cornucopia says. “Depending on who you talk to, you get a different opinion.”
Trader Josiah Gregg was the first white man we know of to write about the pueblo ruins of Chaco Canyon in 1832. The Army Corps of Engineers under Lt. James Simpson surveyed the buildings in 1849. Richard Wetherill moved to Chaco in 1896 to begin excavations at Pueblo Bonito. He assisted the Hyde expedition, led by George H. Pepper from the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where many of the artifacts they uncovered are found today. In 1901, Wetherill filed a homestead deed to protect the sites until a national park could be created to preserve them. Five years later, the Federal Antiquities Act of 1906 was passed; that same year, Mesa Verde was declared a national monument, and on March 11, 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt named Chaco Canyon a national monument.
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