Chaco Culture: A Regional Center of Trade
How Chaco was organized and how its roads carried trade goods. This excerpt uses seven paragraphs of the page. It leaves out the paragraphs about visitor trails and park hours, the list of the park’s great house sites, the World Heritage designation, and the decline of Chaco.
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Chaco Culture National Historical Park lies in a long, shallow canyon on the Colorado Plateau. It is in the middle of the San Juan Basin in northwestern New Mexico. People have lived in this high desert landscape for over 10,000 years. It has long winters, short growing seasons, and little rain. About 1,000 years ago, the ancestral Pueblo people built a remarkable urban center of politics, economy, ceremony, and culture in this desert.
From 850 A.D. to about 1250 A.D., the ancestral Puebloans built buildings and ran a large cultural system across this area. At its peak, a few thousand people may have lived in Chaco Canyon. Thousands more were drawn to the ceremonial gatherings and trading events held throughout the Chacoan system. To house and host these large numbers, the people developed a well-organized community.
To build their communities, the ancestral Puebloans created special styles of masonry that were unique for their time. This let them build multi-story stone structures on mesa tops and on the canyon floors. The “great houses” and other village clusters across the region use this style of masonry. Some of the buildings had hundreds of rooms. They included kivas, terraces, and plazas.
To build these impressive structures, the ancestral Puebloans quarried sandstone blocks and hauled timber from great distances. They took timber from dense forests of oak, pinon, ponderosa pine, and juniper. They built walls that were broad at the base and narrow toward the top. This spread out the weight of the walls and the structure. The structures served public and ceremonial purposes. The many buildings in one place suggest that this area was a regional religious, administrative, commercial, and trading center.
Pueblo Bonito was the center of the Chacoan world. This enormous, well-planned building took decades to build. At its peak, this D-shaped building stood four to five stories tall. It covered 3 acres and had over 600 rooms, 40 kivas, and two plazas. Pueblo Bonito was the focus of ceremonies, administration, trading, storage, hospitality, communications, astronomy, and the burial of honored dead.
Many of the buildings in the Chaco system were lined up with the sun, the moon, and the four main directions. The likely reason was to capture the cycles of the sun and moon. Astronomical markers, communication features, catch basins, canals, check dams, and ditches surrounded clusters of buildings. Over 400 miles of prehistoric roads connected the clusters. Some of these roads were as much as 30 feet wide. They linked dozens of Chaco Canyon’s great houses to over 150 great houses in the region.
The large road system made Chaco the center of a far-reaching trade network. The Chacoans traded pottery, turquoise, seashells, copper bells, macaws, and parrots. They traded among themselves and with groups as far south as Mexico. Chaco pottery, a special Cibola black-on-white pottery, was an important trade item across the system. Only an estimated 20 percent of the pottery found at Chaco was made there. So the pottery likely came from an outlying community. Chacoans used pottery for preparing, serving, and storing food. They also made turquoise into beads, ornaments, and jewelry. They traded it across the Southwest. The ancient roads carried goods. They linked Chaco to outlying communities and to resource areas beyond Chaco Canyon.