Pueblo Bonito
Interesting facts
- A man buried in Room 33 with thousands of turquoise and shell beads has the richest burial ever excavated in the American Southwest.
- DNA from Room 33 showed that nine of those buried there were related through the female line, an elite matriline lasting some 330 years.
- Threatening Rock, which fell in 1941, stood about 97 feet tall and weighed some 30,000 tons; the builders had braced it with supports.
- Traces of cacao found in 2009 had travelled at least 1,200 miles and were the first proof of cacao in the present-day US before the Spanish.
- Excavators recovered 111 cylindrical jars, a vessel shape common in Central America but rare elsewhere in the Southwest.
- The name Pueblo Bonito, "beautiful village", was given in 1849 by Carravahal, the guide to Lieutenant Simpson's expedition.
- Richard Wetherill filed a homestead claim on the ruins themselves; it was voided in 1904 when the federal government took over the land.
- One archaeologist estimated that the main structure took about 805,000 hours of human labour to build.
- Petroglyphs of six-toed feet, dated to the late 10th or early 11th century, are carved on the cliff directly behind the ruin.
- During later building phases some ground-floor rooms were packed with debris to carry the weight of the storeys above.
Why it is worth it
At the bottom of Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico, a D-shaped mass of masonry rises in tiers against the cliff: Pueblo Bonito, the largest of the great houses built by the Ancestral Puebloans. Construction ran in stages from roughly AD 850 to 1150, and at its height the building stood four and in places five storeys tall, with walls up to about a metre thick at the base. Estimates of its size range from some 650 to around 800 rooms spread over two to three acres, arranged around a plaza that a single wall divides into two halves along an almost exact north–south line.
Pueblo Bonito was not a crowded village. Archaeologists now think only a modest number of people lived there permanently, and the small number of burials found fits that view. The two great kivas and more than thirty smaller round chambers point to a place of ceremony and gathering, the hub of a network of straight roads that linked Chaco to dozens of outlying settlements. Finds hint at how far that network reached: traces of cacao carried from Mesoamerica in tall cylindrical jars, and a set of wooden flutes recovered from one of the rooms. Between about 900 and 1150 Chaco was the leading centre of the Ancestral Puebloan world; prolonged drought from the 1130s, together with the loss of the woodland that had supplied timber and fuel, brought that era to an end.
The ruin first entered written record in 1849, when an army expedition under Lieutenant James H. Simpson passed through the canyon. Systematic digging followed between 1896 and 1900 under Richard Wetherill and George H. Pepper, and much of what they recovered went to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In January 1941 a huge slab of the canyon wall known as Threatening Rock, which the builders had long tried to shore up, finally fell and crushed part of the rear wall. Pueblo Bonito is part of Chaco Culture National Historical Park, inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987.
Getting there
Pueblo Bonito lies inside Chaco Culture National Historical Park, about 78 km in a straight line from Farmington, New Mexico. Most road access is from US Route 550 near Nageezi, followed by county roads whose final stretch is unpaved. The nearest airport is Gallup Municipal Airport (GUP), about 96 km away; the main regional hub is Albuquerque International Sunport (ABQ), further south-east along US 550 and Interstate 25.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Pueblo Bonito is the largest and best-known great house in Chaco Culture National Historical Park, northern New Mexico. It was built by the Ancestral Puebloans who occupied the structure between AD 828 and 1126.
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