Chaco Culture National Historical Park,U.S.

Presentation by
P.Srimathi
M.Arch, PMIST.
Chaco Culture National Historical Park is a United States National Historical
Park in the American Southwest hosting a remains of pueblos. The park is
located in north western New Mexico, between Albuquerque and Farmington,
in a remote canyon cut.

In the South western United States, Pueblo (capitalized) refers to the Native

tribes of America having fixed-location communities with permanent buildings.

Between AD 900 and 1150, Chaco Canyon was a

major center of culture for the Ancestral Puebloans. 
Chacoans quarried sandstone blocks and hauled
timber from great distances, assembling fifteen major
complexes that remained the largest buildings ever
built in North America until the 19th century

This site was declared a national monument in 1907 and became one of
the original units of the NPS when the agency was created in 1916. The
long history o f CCNHP as a heritage site provides an excellent illustration
of how values emerge and evolve with new knowledge as well as how
they are influenced by changes of values in society.
 HISTORY OF THE SETTLEMENT
History of Settlement an d Use Current evidence indicates a broad and
relatively continuous habitation of the San Juan Basin during the Paleo
Indian period, roughly between 8,000 and 10,000 years ago. The earliest
remains o f human habitation in Chaco Canyon date to 7,000 to 2,000
years ago. These early inhabitants apparently were semi nomadic hunter-
gatherers. Between two and three thousand years ago, inhabitants o f the
canyon began to establish more-permanent settlements, facilitated by
their increasingly sophisticated use of domesticated strains of squash,
beans, and corn
 ARCHITECTURE
• This place seems to have communities housed in apartment structures built of
stone, adobe mud, and other local material. 
The structures were usually multi-storied buildings surrounding an open plaza,
with rooms accessible only through ladders raised/lowered by the inhabitants, 
• The phases of occupation in Chaco Canyon left behind complex masonry
structures known as "great houses," containing hundreds of rooms and dozens
of kivas that were much larger in scale than anything previously built in the
region
• Other features of the Chaco Phenomenon include road alignments with cut
stairways and masonry ramps that lead to more than 150 outlying great houses
and settlements.
• The Chacoans also created and depended on their water control and
distribution structures to manage the scant seasonal rains, and they depended
on their astronomical knowledge to anticipate calendric cycles
Great houses, such as
Pueblo Bonito, are unique
to Chaco culture. They
have large numbers of
rectangular and irregular
rooms as well as round
structures of different
sizes, called kivas. The
purpose o f the kivas is
not known with certainty,
although it is assumed
that they were communal
gathering places, perhaps
used for ceremonies.
 TANGIBLE VALUES ASSOCIATED

When Chaco Canyon National Monument was created in 1907, the

presidential proclamation cited "the extraordinary interest [of Pueblo
ruins], because of their number and their great size, and because of the
innumerable and valuable relics of a prehistoric people which they
contain ".
• Evidence of a civilization that flourished between the ninth and the
eleventh centuries and had high achievements in architecture, agriculture,
social complexity, engineering, astronomy, and economic organization
• Chaco "great houses"—the largest, best preserved, and most complex
prehistoric architectural structures in North America
• A regional system of communities centred in Chaco Canyon and linked by
roads and trade networks throughout.
• 120 years o f archaeological and anthropological research in the Park.. .
and more than 1.5 million artefacts and archival documents
• The largest long-term protected area in north ­western New Mexico, which
encompasses relatively undisturbed examples of floral and faunal, and
offers opportunities to conserve the regions biodiversity and monitor its
environmental quality
Reasoning the Value

• It was obvious even in the early years of scientific archaeology that these
places were evidence of a sophisticated culture, with capacities for labor
organization and large-scale food production.
• The evidence from the Chacoan sites began to emerge, and it
demonstrated that trade goods from great distances were moving around
the region.
• More recently, the astronomical associations among Chacoan sites and
roads, their orientations to the movement of the sun and moon and to
other heavenly events.
 INTANGIBLE VALUES ASSOCIATED
There are a number of intangible elements that contribute to the aesthetic
quality of the place, such as clean air, silence, and solitude. Taken together,
they are a powerful value of the Park and more than the simple sum of the
parts. The evocative qualities of the landscape have changed little since 1907,
but they have become more valuable because of the increasing rarity of such
places in a more crowded, more mobile world. In recent decades, the
aesthetic value created by the conditions mentioned above has been bundled
with other elements and is referred to by Park managers as "the quality
through experience." This quality is seen to depend on a number of elements
that include:
• unimpaired views
• an un-crowded park
• ancient sites with minimal distractions
• clear air
• no intrusions of man-made noise or light
SPIRITUAL VALUE
• Chaco Canyon is claimed as a sacred place for members of clans and
religious societies of the Pueblos of New Mexico.
• Chaco is a place important to Native groups for a range of ceremonial
activities, including the offering of prayers, the gathering of plants and
minerals, and the collection o f Anasazi potsherds for use as tempering
material by pottery makers. Paintings and carvings in the rock walls of the
Chaco Canyon show modern Pueblo religious symbols and Navajo healing
ceremonies

SOCIAL VALUE
• Pueblos retain an emotional tie to many places such as former homes,
burial places o f relatives, and places of importance in their religious
traditions
• These aspects and details of these histories—as well as religious and
cultural beliefs—are not shared with outsiders, only shared to the society.
ENVIRONMENTAL VALUE
The environmental qualities of the Park can be seen to have two
components. The first is composed of the landforms and water resources
in their relatively unimpaired condition, and the plants and wildlife native
to this ecological zone, along with relict natural communities of cultivars
and other species that were introduced or used in ancient or historic
times. As such, this constellation of features and elements creates an
environment that exists in only a few places in the world. The second
important quality resides in rarity These kinds of microenvironments are
becoming less common over time , and one exists at CCNHP today
because it has been protected for decades from the damage caused by
grazing, mining , air and water pollution, and the introduction of exotic
species.

ECONOMICAL VALUE
One of the first values associated wit h the Chacoan ruins was the artefacts
found in them. While a big part of the interest was motivated by scientific
curiosity, there was an economic value implicit in the gathering of artefacts to be
sold to museums and collectors.