Chaco Canyon's great houses required hauling 200,000+ tree trunks from mountains 50+ miles away. Burials and midden evidence suggest fewer than 3,000 permanent residents, and no visible elite residences appear in the record. Dendrochronology gives us year-precise construction dates.
Chaco great houses built with 200,000 hauled logs despite small permanent population
Site mentioned
📍 Chaco Canyon
Key facts
- The rise and fall of Chaco Canyon defines the Pueblo 2 period
- First great houses built were Una Vida and Penasco Blanco, at opposite ends of the canyon
- Great houses contained dozens to hundreds of rooms with multiple stories
- Construction used core and veneer architecture, with cut-stone exteriors and rubble cores
- Over 200,000 tree trunks were hauled by hand from the Chuska and Zuni mountains, both more than 50 miles away
- Thousands of tons of stone were carried at least a mile from mesa tops down into the canyon floor
- Burials and trash midden evidence suggest a permanent population of less than 3,000
- Full-time residents lived in simple houses on the canyon floor, not in the great houses
- No visible elite residences or higher-status lifestyles appear in the archaeological record
- Dendrochronology provides year-precise construction dates
Sources
The Chaco World: Great Houses, Outliers, and Ancient Roadscrowcanyon.org
Built in stages beginning in the A.D. 800s, Pueblo Bonito contained between 600 and 800 rooms and in places stood five stories tall. Escalante Pueblo. Photos by ...
History & Culture - Chaco Culture National Historical Park (U.S. ...nps.gov
During the middle and late 800s, the great houses of Pueblo Bonito, Una Vida, and Peñasco Blanco were constructed, followed by Hungo Pavi, ...
Pueblo Bonito - Chaco Research Archivechacoarchive.org
Pueblo Bonito (Spanish for “beautiful town”) is the best known of all Chacoan great houses. Located near the center of a cluster of great and small houses ...
The deterioration of the Pueblo Bonito Great House in the Chaco ...pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
The present study explores why Pueblo Bonito, one of those massive buildings, did not survive the centuries by assessing structural conditions obvious on some ...
Great House | Colorado Encyclopediacoloradoencyclopedia.org
Chaco Canyon's Great Houses were mostly built from 850 to 1130. After construction ceased at Chaco Canyon, large Great Houses continued to be built at Aztec ...
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