Chaco Canyon..A place of amazement..

Chaco Canyon National Historic Park contains the largest stone ruins in the US, including Pueblo Bonito, Chettro Ketl, and Casa Rinconada

One of Americas least known places...I loved learning about Chaco Canyon, so i will share with you all..




This one is big..but worth the look..




Chaco Culture National Historical Park in Northwestern New Mexico contains a dozen Great Houses, large multi-room masonry constructs. The Chaco Canyon structures were built between 850 and 1150. Of the Great Pueblos in Chaco Canyon, D-shaped Pueblo Bonito, possibly five stories tall along the outer arc, has the greatest number of rooms, estimated at 650. This view is from the mesa to the North of the ruin. The center wall aligns to true North.

source





Fajada Butte is noted for the Sun Dagger hierophany, a petroglyph spiral behind slabs of rock which framed zenith passage sun and moon light as a unique, complex seasonal calendar. Below, an interactive display at Maxwell Museum, University of New Mexico, displays the change in illumination for each season. The slabs at the site recently shifted, likely studied to death!

There are 3 large rocks situated to shine the light from the sun at the winter and summer solstice and also and the spring and autumn equinox's..which shows this sun dagger..




also..

The Anasazi residents of Chaco Canyon were attentive to the movements of the heavens, that much is clear. The famous Sun Dagger on Fajada Butte in the center of Chaco Canyon is a solar calendar that heralds the winter solstice when a band of sunlight passing through between two slabs intersects the center of a spiral. A square of light floods a notch in the wall of Casa Rinconada's Great Kiva on the summer solstice, and locations marked within the Great Kiva are thought by some to create a simple stellar observatory.


I wanted to throw in a video or two also..



pretty dang cool....




A little info about the logs used to roof the whole place..

one of the many mysteries of New Mexico's Chaco Canyon; namely, the unknown source of the huge numbers of logs required to roof the many structures in this fantastic complex. (Pueblo Bonito alone contains some 600 rooms!) As many as 200,000 pine and fir trees had to be cut down and transported as much as 50 miles, for no sizable trees grow near Chaco Canyon today. There is no consensus as to where all these trees were felled.

logs

This is one of Americas great places for archeoastronomy..Please feel free to look at the links and give me a comment or two about this place, also, add some interesting stuff about Chaco Canyon...

ancient observatory

sundagger info

PDF

[edit on 30-8-2010 by baddmove]

Awesome pics and vids! Thanks for sharing this with us! S & F!

reply to post by baddmove


Nice thread baddmove. I've never been to Chaco Canyon but I've always wanted to visit it, and now maybe I will thanks to you.

Wow. Never knew this existed at all. Fascinating. Nice find!

Originally posted by hhcore
Wow. Never knew this existed at all. Fascinating. Nice find!

Quoted hhcore who quoted me in the chat room after it was posted.

Nice find man. Thanks.

You bet....

thanks guys, i would love to go see it one day..

hopefully next springtime...

Oh yeah, I remember learning about this in my Cultural Geography class. Pretty cool place, yeah they say the Anasazi just up and vanished completely from society. There was even an excellent video in which a researcher tried to interpret what he believed to be evidence of a multidimensional crossroad/gateway/overlap at chaco canyon.

Ok, here's the ats thread talking about this guy's research.


I think I know where I'm gonna be for The Light Show.

[edit on 30-8-2010 by leira7]

reply to post by leira7


Thanks for the response..

nice video too...

i've been there.
it is AWESOME.

the vibes are cool and especially in the kivas
the thing that really impressed me was how BIG it is.
it just has this feeling of expansiveness, which isn't easy to have, being all alone and deserted in the middle of the desert! i mean, everything is expansive out here but that place FEELS somehow different.

i can't explain any better than that. it just feels full in its emptiness.

i've lived here in NM for most of my life - the brief forays to Texas are better left unmentioned.

and i've traveled all over the state because when you live in the Land of Enchantment, you don't need to leave the state to have an incomparable vacation, no matter what your tastes.

so i've been to almost all the ruins that i know of, such as the Puye Cliff Dwellings on the Pajarito (little bird) plateau, the Salinas monument: Gran Quivira, Abo, and Quarai, the Gila Cliff Dwellings, and of course Chaco Canyon. those are just the major ones and off the top of my head.

the cliff ruins at Puye are spectacular and were in amazingly good condition back when i visited, many many moons ago...here are some pictures [but that linking didn't work - just do a google image search for "Puye Cliff Dwellings"]

and then the Gila cliff dwellings are just as awesome - and the little hike, from the parking area to the actual cliff face in which these people built their homes, is through a wooded creek bed, in the bottom of a very narrow flood canyon, with beautiful trees and sparkly aspen leaves.
you walk along in this beautiful dappled light and then WOW suddenly there it is, this very well preserved ancient cliff house in which you can set your own feet and walk around and feel the vibes.



all of these places have to do with the Mogollon and/or Anasazi, which, if i'm thinking correctly, are closely related somehow if not the same actual lineage.

the places of the Anasazi all seem to have a mysteriousness about them, not a memory but a presence, like i was saying about Chaco.

these were the ancient ancestors of the Hopi and the Navajo - even though those two groups don't seem to have an affinity for one another, they both hold the Anasazi in the same general frame of reference that makes me believe they are ancient cousins, somehow.

the Hopi mysticism seems related to the Anasazi, and truly, the roots of all the peoples from the four corners area must surely go down into the one main root that is Anasazi.

i love a good mystery, but i don't really see the end of the Anasazi culture as a mystery. climate change could have very well brought their idyllic (or so we'd like to believe it was idyllic) lifestyle and communities to an end when their water supply was drastically diminished or perhaps it disappeared altogether. there aren't many water sources there, now, for sure - and what scant supply there is, is absolutely not the volume that would be required to support a society as big as theirs was, at its peak.

and so surely, out of necessity and basic human instinct, these people did what most always people do in that sort of situation: disperse to survive. the end of the pueblo era was just the beginning of the next.

but the energy of these people, whomever they were, in their own eyes, whatever they called themselves, is enduring - it still permeates New Mexico. if you get a feel for this energy, you will feel it all around you. it somehow is what has flavored everything that has evolved into what we know today as "New Mexican."

do a google image search for just "Anasazi" - that is the flavor of New Mexico!

i wish i could explain this better.
you guys will just have to come visit!


[edit on 8/31/2010 by queenannie38]

[edit on 8/31/2010 by queenannie38]

Chaco Canyon is 30 minutes away from me. Been there many times.

reply to post by queenannie38


Thank you for the wonderful reply...

It is very beautiful there and i hope one day i may get a chance to go to Chaco Canyon..

I've seen a couple of aerial shots and it really is huge..

Thanks again for your reply..

thanks for all the replies all..

i hope everyone enjoyed this thread...

been there many times. usually do a week or two in the area every year.
been exploring the ancient roads. they all lead somewhere, and can be hiked and explored on blm outside of the park.
chaco roads
the topic is worth a search beyond what i just linked.
the gila dwellings were mentioned above, i live in the area part of the year, and i'm pretty sure a road links the two.

reply to post by baddmove


Correct me if I'm wrong, but I vaguely remember reading or watching a PBS show about how some researchers believe that the civilization (before the Aztecs) that built the Sun and Moon Pyramids in Mexico City were the ones that went north and created the settlement at Chaco Canyon.
Nevertheless, it is strange how many Pre-Columbian Native American and Central American population centers just got up and left and left everything intact.
Interesting indeed...

reply to post by Kratos40


My wife told me she saw a short blurb about it on the History Channel and she says that they think it was also a astrological site in ancient times..

The whole area was used to read stars and whatnot...

that's pretty cool..I'm going to look that up also....

reply to post by baddmove


I'm going to search the web to see if I can find that old PBS show. From what I remember, it was said the last remaining group of the Teotihuacan builders may have ended up in what is now known as Chaco Canyon. If true, what would make them leave their great city-state and go north? This is fascinating.
I'm in Arizona, so I think I will be traveling to go see this site really soon.

IMHO,the VERY best site about Chaco Canyon is done by one of the researchers/docents who lives there. You get all sorts of interesting stuff, including "what did they feed the turkeys that they domesticated" to "why didn't they have wheels" and "What kinds of dogs did they have?"

You get to see a side of Chaco Canyon that NO tourist ever sees!
gamblershouse.wordpress.com...

Anyone want to go? is it free to the public or do you have to make reservations or something.

i would like to camp there

If we can, we might go next year. Meanwhile, I found a guide to visiting Chaco Canyon:
gocalifornia.about.com...

I don't know that I'd encourage camping there since it's a fairly fragile habitat. Besides, the desert gets unexpectedly cold at night and if you're new to desert area camping it won't be a very comfortable stay.

And take a moderately high clearance vehicle. When we go, we'll take the Ford F150. I live in Texas... I know how to interpret the phrase, "dirt roads"!

Originally posted by Byrd
If we can, we might go next year. Meanwhile, I found a guide to visiting Chaco Canyon:
gocalifornia.about.com...

I don't know that I'd encourage camping there since it's a fairly fragile habitat. Besides, the desert gets unexpectedly cold at night and if you're new to desert area camping it won't be a very comfortable stay.

And take a moderately high clearance vehicle. When we go, we'll take the Ford F150. I live in Texas... I know how to interpret the phrase, "dirt roads"!

never been camping in the desert but i have been camping before.

i can deal i'm moving out into that kind of environment anyways.

i was hoping i could go there to celebrate my 21st birthday. just me maybe 1 more person.