NASA imaging reveals 31-mile Ancestral Puebloan 'spirit road' from Chaco Canyon

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Key facts

• In 1982, NASA scientist Thomas Sever used thermal imaging at the National Space Technology Lab in Mississippi to map farmland; at night he turned it on the New Mexico desert and found straight lines 30 feet wide surfacing from beneath nine centuries of sand
• The Great North Road runs 31 miles north out of Chaco Canyon, the ceremonial capital of the Ancestral Puebloan world
• The road is wider than a modern two-lane highway, lined in places with stone curbs, built by people with no wheels, no carts, and no pack animals
• For 10 miles it holds true north within half a degree; at mile 12 it bends 2 degrees and holds that new line for nearly 20 more miles; in places it runs as four parallel roads side by side
• At cliffs, builders cut staircases straight into the rock; after 31 miles the road reaches the rim of Cui's Canyon and stops, with the collapsed remains of a wooden stairway dropping 500 feet to the canyon floor below
• Chaco's great houses hold hundreds of rooms but hardly any hearths for cooking and only a few hundred burials have been found in the entire canyon
• In the 1980s, a team led by researcher Anna Sofaer compared new maps against the living traditions of Pueblo descendants of the builders
• In Pueblo cosmology, north is the place of emergence where the first people climbed into this world and where the spirits of the dead return; in Tewa, the word for road translates as 'channel for life's breath'
• The pottery along the road was smashed the way offerings are broken for the dead, and horseshoe-shaped shrines marked a spirit's path; the road's bend aimed at the steepest plunge into the canyon
• Below the road's starting point at Pueblo Bonito lies Chetro Ketl's great house and beneath it a ceremonial chamber called Alkiva, which contained 17,000 beads of turquoise and shell sealed in its walls; the structure burned, destroying its wooden superstructure
• Around 1130 AD a roughly 50-year drought gripped the region, after which the people appear to have walked away from the canyon

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