Chaco Canyon National Historic Park Overview

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Chaco Culture National Historical Park

Contact Details
Chaco Culture National Historical Park
P.O. Box 220
Nageezi, New Mexico 87037
Phone: 505-786-7014

Chaco Canyon, for all its wild beauty, seems an unlikely place for the Anasazi culture to take root and flourish. This is desert country, with long winters, short growing seasons, and marginal rainfall. Yet a thousand years ago, this valley was a center of Anasazi life. This people farmed the lowlands and built great masonry towns that connected with other towns over a far-reaching network of roads.

The drive to Chaco Canyon travels through a gentle rolling hill country. The roads leading to the park are unpaved, contributing to the sense of going back in time. When you're not passing through sandstone-walled canyons, the horizon extends far and wide. The land is nearly treeless, and can feel empty, until you slow down and take another look.

During earlier times, Chaco was the center of a far-flung trading network. Goods were exchanged internally within the Chacoan system and externally with groups as far south as Mexico. Chaco's distinctive Cibola black-on-white pottery may have originated in outlying towns to the south and west. One estimate is that only about 20 percent of the pottery used here was made here. This may have been because there was better clay in other villages and more wood available for firing the vessels.

What Chaco lacked in pottery it more than made up for in turquoise ornaments. Raw turquoise was imported from distant mines and transformed with exquisite craftsmanship into necklaces, bracelets, and pendants. Great quantities of such jewelry have been found here, more than at any other southwestern site.

Other evidence of the trading system are the many seashells (often strung into necklaces), copper bells, and remains of macaws or parrots found here. The two latter items suggest contact with Mexico, perhaps with the ancient Toltecs.

The ruins evoke this impressive degree of social organization. They have mysteries that may never be revealed. And perhaps that is as it should be. The ruins of Chaco Canyon are a product of time. And time is a gentleman. What's left unsaid should be respected. And, like a gentleman, the ruins will never directly ask you to leave. But some say that Chaco's ruins are overburdened by visitors. If you go, it is particularly important to tread lightly here. And speak softly.