LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Chaco Canyon: Great Houses
built 631 days ago
The entire design of the Chaco Canyon village seems to have been planned; the Great Houses were constructed with careful symmetry and many were aligned with the cardinal directions and the solstices. Morphologically similar Great Houses, kivas, and other structures were ... built in the many Chaco "outlier" settlements across the Colorado Plateau, although none approached the dimensions of the largest Great Houses at Chaco.
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Chaco Canyon colonizers came into the established Great Sage Plain communities, intermarried and built their special style of great houses such as Lowry, Ida Jean, Goodman Point, Escalante, Sand Canyon, and Wallace. There were two distinct periods of colonization in the C.E. 1090’s and the C.E. 1120’s . Most, if not all, of the great houses were abandoned at about C.E. 1150 which marks the end of the Chaco era throughout the region. The entire region was abandoned by C.E.
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The majority of the exposed features in Chaco Canyon belong to a suite of rocks known as the Mesa Verde group. The further subdivisions of the unit are, from oldest to youngest, the Point Lookout Sandstone, the Menefee Formation, and the Cliff House Sandstone. Of these three formations, only two, the Menefee and Cliff House are visible in Chaco, while all three are exposed at Mesa Verde. An additional two younger units, the Lewis Shale and the Picture Cliffs Sandstone, are generally exposed only near the northern boundary of the park.
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In Chaco Canyon's northern reaches lies another cluster of Great Houses; among the largest are Casa Chiquita ("Small House"), a village built in the 1080s AD, when, in a period of ample rainfall, Chacoan culture was expanding. Its layout featured a smaller, squarer profile; it ... lacked the open plazas and separate kivas of its predecessors.[46] Larger, squarer blocks of stone were used in the masonry; kivas were designed in the northern Mesa Verdean tradition. Two miles down the canyon is Peñasco Blanco ("White Bluff"), an arc-shaped compound built atop the canyon's southern rim in five distinct stages between AD 900 and 1125. A cliff painting (the "Supernova Platograph") nearby may record the sighting of the SN 1054 supernova on July 5, 1054.
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Chaco Canyon is perhaps the most impresive archaeological site in the southwest United States. Like many of the ancient civiliations of the greater southwest, archaeologists struggle to determine why such places were deserted. Surrounded by a network of roads which ties it into the greater southwest region, an impressive showing of technology for its time, and some of the largest structures ever found, it is a unique site. You can visit the National Park Service website to learn more about the canyon.
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Hike up Chaco Canyon to both early and late sites seldom seen by park visitors. Walk by Wijiji, a late great house that may never have been occupied. Examine Shabik'eschee Village, one of the earliest sites of the canyon, dating from the Basketmaker period prior to A.D. 750. Bid farewell to "downtown" Chaco. Overnight Bernalillo.
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Great Houses