The monumental center of the Ancestral Puebloan world in the high desert of northwestern New Mexico between roughly 850 and 1150 CE — a place of enormous multi-story great houses, precise astronomical alignments, and a network of straight roads, built in a harsh landscape, debated by archaeologists, and held sacred by the Pueblo nations descended from its builders.
A shallow desert canyon in northwestern New Mexico holds buildings that should not be there. A thousand years ago people raised stone great houses four and five stories tall, with hundreds of rooms, in a place too dry to easily feed a crowd. They moved roof beams by human labor from mountains dozens of miles away, without draft animals or wheeled vehicles. They cut roads straight across the land and aligned walls to the sun and the moon. Then, after about 1150, the center shifted elsewhere. The builders did not vanish; their descendants are the living Pueblo nations, and the canyon is sacred to them still. What Chaco was for remains one of the genuinely open questions of ancient North America.