Southwest
These sources focus mainly on Ancestral Pueblo communities, especially Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon, where archaeology provides strong evidence about settlement, farming, architecture, trade, and community life.
Start with the overview
Use the Khan Academy reading to identify the region’s climate, farming traditions, and major communities.
Read the OverviewG — Geography
Connect mesas, forests, weather, water, farming, and where people built their homes.
A short overview of environment, farming, pithouses, pueblos, and cliff dwellings.
R — Religion
Use the answers about kivas and the buildings to see what archaeologists know—and what they are still unsure about.
Explore living Pueblo perspectives on prayer, song, dance, and plazas.
Look for sacred mountains and shrines, ceremonies, and Pueblo descendants’ ideas about Chaco as a gathering place.
A — Achievement
Study multi-story masonry, roads, water control, lines of sight, and astronomical alignments.
Investigate construction, plazas, storage rooms, kivas, and water access.
P — Politics
Compare different ideas about Chaco as an administrative, trade, ritual, or pilgrimage center.
See how Chaco became a ceremonial, administrative, and economic center connected by roads to over 150 great houses.
E — Economics
Follow evidence of long-distance trade in pottery, turquoise, seashells, copper bells, and macaws.
Learn how corn, beans, and squash worked together as crops and as a balanced diet.
S — Social Structure
Use room clusters, kivas, and plazas to infer how families and communities lived.
Look at burials and access to rare objects for possible evidence of differences in status.
Read a Pueblo answer about how a clan system organizes families.