Chaco Canyon

Today was a lot of driving - and a lot of it on unpaved roads. We went from Gallup, New Mexico to Chaco Culture National Historical Park. We stopped at this shopping center to get some food. We were the only non-Navajos there. 

 The last 20 miles of the drive, looked like this. It was slow going but we finally made it:

Chaco Canyon contains several prehistoric big houses, or pueblos. We took pictures of a few small ones.

 

The white circles in the beams are where they took a core sample to date the wood. They refilled the holes with numbered cork.

These are kivas:

Our favorite place here was the Pueblo Bonito. It was built in stages from CE 850 to 1150 by ancestral Puebloan people. It was a special place where clans stopped and lived during their sacred migrations. Here's one migrating now!

This shows the original back wall [to the left of the door]and then a later wall that was added and created more small rooms accessed from the back only:

Here you can see the beams that would have held up the roof:

This is one of several kivas. It is a round ceremonial room used for ceremonies. Some were large enough for hundreds of people.

If you were standing inside the kiva looking up - this is what the roof would have looked like:

They, apparently, were very short people!

Kent called this the "Nancy door":

Archeologists think it was used as an astronomical marker. It was built in the eastern part of the pueblo and when the sun rises on the morning of the winter solstice [my birthday], sunlight goes through the opening and hits the opposite room behind it. Who knew I had my own door!!

Here is a close up of the rails and beams used to support the roof. Plus, I thought this guy was really cute!!

We really loved this place and probably would have stayed longer, but we had that 20 miles of dirt road to travel, before dark. Fortunately, the road out wasn't quite as bad as the road in!! Happy ancient ruins!