The Pueblo Bonito Mounds Of Chaco Canyon

Chaco Canyon has one of the most significant concentrations of archaeological remains in North America. Pueblo Bonito, the largest and best known of Chaco’s great houses, was largely excavated in the late 1890s and early 1920s, but then no extensive excavations were conducted at the site until a team of archaeologists from the University of New Mexico began work there in 2004. In exploring the possible evidence of water-control features, archaeologists recovered some 200,000 artifacts. Here they use the artifacts and fauna they found to examine the lives and activities of the inhabitants of Pueblo Bonito as well as to further interpret current models of Chaco archaeology. The contributors particularly focus on questions regarding crafts production, long-distance exchange relationships, and evidence for feasting and other ritual behavior. The results from the 2004–2008 excavations challenge many interpretations related to the daily activities of the Pueblo Bonito population while supporting others.

The House of the Cylinder Jars documents the re-excavation of Room 28, and places it within the context of other rooms at Pueblo Bonito, and describes the ritual termination by fire of the materials stored in the room.

Archaeologists use the artifacts and fauna they found to examine the lives and activities of the inhabitants of Pueblo Bonito as well as to further interpret current models of Chaco archaeology.

Pueblo Bonito is the largest and most famous ruin in New Mexico's Chaco Culture National Historical Park. Built by the ancestral Puebloan people some 1,000 years ago, the ruin testifies to one of the oldest and most complex societies ever discovered in North America. Study of the large corpus of data continues to generate new ideas about the people who lived their and their way of life. This extensively illustrated volume commemorates the recent centennial of the first large-scale excavations at Pueblo Bonito, with leading experts writing on various aspects of the site, including its setting, construction sequence and labor requirements, possible astronomical orientations and related rituals, and burials. The book probes deeply for answers to these and other perplexing questions about Pueblo Bonito and its people.

The site of a great Ancestral Pueblo center in the 11th and 12th centuries AD, the ruins in Chaco Canyon look like a city to some archaeologists, a ceremonial center to others. Chaco and the people who created its monumental great houses, extensive roads, and network of outlying settlements remain an enigma in American archaeology. Two decades after the latest and largest program of field research at Chaco (the National Park Service's Chaco Project from 1971 to 1982) the original researchers and other leading Chaco scholars convened to evaluate what they now know about Chaco in light of new theories and new data. Those meetings culminated in an advanced seminar at the School of American Research, where the Chaco Project itself was born in 1968. In this capstone volume, the contributors address central archaeological themes, including environment, organization of production, architecture, regional issues, and society and polity. They place Chaco in its time and in its region, considering what came before and after its heyday and its neighbors to the north and south, including Mesoamerica.

Chaco Canyon, in far northwest New Mexico, was a major center of Puebloan culture between AD 900 and 1250. It is believed two thousand to six thousand people lived, annually, in about one hundred settlements scattered in and around the Canyon. The altitude (the canyon floor is sixty-two hundred feet above sea level) and the arid, desolate setting resulted in unique architecture and living styles. Puebloan masons used local sandstone and adobe mortar to build great houses consisting of fifty to seven hundred rooms. In The Great Houses of Chaco, Jack Campbell's elegant black and white photos explore the intricate structures that have come to define Chaco. David Stuart and Thomas Windes provide essays that place the photographs into historic contexts, and Katherine Kallestad has written captions that explain the images themselves. Together, they detail Chacoan culture and the magnificent ruins that are the primary source of our knowledge about the ancestral people of this region.

Chaco Canyon, the great Ancestral Pueblo site of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, remains a central problem of Southwestern archaeology. Chaco, with its monumental Ògreat houses,Ó was the center of a vast region marked by ÒoutlierÓ great houses. The canyon itself has been investigated for over a century, but only a few of the more than 200 outlier great housesÑkey to understanding Chaco and its timesÑhave been excavated. This volume explores the Chaco and post-Chaco eras in the northern San Juan area through extensive excavations at the Bluff Great House, a major Chaco ÒoutlierÓ in Utah. BluffÕs massive great house, great kiva, and earthen berms are described and compared to other great houses in the northern Chaco region. Those assessments support intriguing new ideas about the Chaco region and the effect of the collapse of Chaco Canyon on ÒoutlyingÓ great houses. New insights from the Bluff Great House clarify the construction and use of great houses during the Chaco era and trace the history of great houses in the generations after ChacoÕs decline. An innovative comparative study of the northern and southern portions of the Chaco world (the northern San Juan area around Bluff and the Cibola area around Zuni) leads to new ideas about population aggregation and regional abandonment in the Southwest. Appendixes on CD-ROM present details and descriptions of artifacts recovered from Bluff: ceramics, projectile points, pollen analyses, faunal remains, bone tools, ornaments, and more. This book is one of only a handful of reports on Chacoan great houses in the northern San Juan region. It provides an in-depth study of the Chaco era and clarifies the relationship of ÒoutlyingÓ great houses to Chaco Canyon. Research at the Bluff Great House begins to answer key questions about the nature of Chaco and its region, and the history of the northern San Juan in the Chaco and post-Chaco worlds.