The Ancestral Puebloans, once called the Anasazi, were the master builders of the American Southwest. From their heartland in the Four Corners region they raised the monumental great houses of Chaco Canyon — Pueblo Bonito chief among them, with over 600 rooms — and the dramatic cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde, tucked into sandstone alcoves hundreds of feet above the canyon floor. They farmed maize in an arid land, tracked the heavens, and traded for macaws and seashells. In the late 1200s a prolonged megadrought, combined with social upheaval, drove them to abandon these settlements. They did not vanish — their descendants are today’s Hopi, Zuni, and Rio Grande Pueblo peoples.
Worth remembering
- Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon had over 600 rooms and stood as the largest building in North America until the 1800s.
- They built straight roads across the desert and aligned structures to solstices and lunar cycles.
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Sources
- Ancestral Puebloans built and then abandoned Four Corners settlements by c. 1300 CE Wikipedia
- Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon preserve their cliff dwellings and great houses Wikipedia
- Chaco Canyon served as the cultural and ceremonial hub of Ancestral Pueblo civilization between roughly 850 and 1250 CE; Pueblo Bonito, its largest great house, rose four to five stories with over 600 rooms U.S. National Park Service — Chaco Culture NHP
- The Ancestral Pueblo people occupied Mesa Verde for over seven centuries before abandoning it around 1300 CE; the cliff dwellings they left behind range from early pithouse villages to large multi-story structures U.S. National Park Service — Mesa Verde NP
A graveyard tradition: leave a stone to show you came, and remembered.