Chaco

I was last at Chaco at least 22 years ago and a lot had changed: the road in, the visitor center, the archaeological interpretations. However, the campsite where we sent up was exactly the same. And, of course, the Chacoan Great Houses which have endured for 1,000 years, were as I remembered them.

Beginning some time around 850 A.D. and continuing until some time around 1130 A.D., the Chacoans, the ancestors of the modern pueblo people, built villages, great kivas, roads, signal towers, and at least a dozen great houses along the Chaco wash. The Chacoans were gifted astronomers and stone masons. The masonry in the Great Houses such as Pueblo Benito and Chetro Ketl is breathtaking. More than 200,000 trees were carried from the distance Chuska mountains to build these three and four-story cities, some with as many as 500 to 650 rooms and numerous kivas. The Chacoan trade network stretched from the California coast, from which they obtained shells, to Meso America, as evidenced by the presences of macaws, copper bells, and recently even traces of chocolate found on pottery. More turquoise was found in a single burial here than in the rest of the Southwest combined.

The boys learned so much from the campfire talks and ranger guided tours. And so did I. Most archaeologists seems to agree that Chaco was more a gathering place for the peoples of the San Juan basin rather than a major population center. What were consider "outliers" in my day are now seen as part of an integrated Chacoan system.
The Chacoans built ramps and stairways up to prominent mesas and built huge cairns for massive bonfires. Thus, just like in the scene from Lord of the Rings, when the signal fire is lit at Minas Tirith to signal Aragorn and Theoden waiting hundreds of miles away in Rohan, so the real Chacoans could almost instantly send messages across their world from Gallup in the south to Mesa Verde in the north.

The boys also learned that much of the every day lives of these engineers, astronomers, masons, farmers, and politicians is lost. Pottery sherds and flakes from stone tools, plus a few tantalizing fragments on textiles, only hint at a rich and varied material culture. The boys asked dozens of intelligent question of the park service guides and visiting archaeologists about trade, domestication of turkeys, farming, irrigation, masonry styles, and so on. In fact, a University of Texas professor leading a summer field trip of college kids was overheard chiding his students that a 9-year-old asked better questions than they did. He also told me that he would not want to get into an argument with Ted about anything because he would lose.

The part that the boys will remember best, however, is exploring Pueblo Benito at high speed until they each knew as well as any park service professional and better than any adult visitor. Zipping through doorways that seemed built for them, they experienced this Great House as a whole just as the original Chacoans did.