LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Chaco Canyon: Miles
built 606 days ago
Any route to Chaco Canyon will involve driving some distance on dirt roads which are seldom maintained and may become impassable in wet weather. Call (505) 786-7014 to check the road conditions before you go. The nearest gasoline station is 60 miles from Chaco Canyon. Be sure to fill your tank.
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After it leaves U.S. 550, the route to Chaco Canyon is paved for five miles. Then come 16 miles of bare, grated earth marred by teeth-rattling washboards and sizable ruts. The park itself is no luxury resort either. There is no food. The only lodging is a campground.
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The Thermal Infrared Multispectral Scanner (TIMS) was flown by NASA over Chaco Canyon for the first time in spring of 1982. TIMS measures temperature differences near the ground, it has five meter resolution. Prehistoric roads from 900 or 1000 AD were detected. The roads could not be discerned by the naked eye from ground level. They ... could not be seen in either aerial photography or color infrared photographs. Three more flights over Chaco detected over 200 miles of a prehistoric roadway system, as well as prehistoric walls, buildings, and agricultural fields.
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The Chaco Collection contains approximately one million artifacts from over 120 sites in Chaco Canyon and the surrounding region. Because most of the artifacts were systematically collected and documented, the collections are extremely valuable for scientific studies. The Chaco archives can be viewedthrough the Chaco Digital Initiative at the University of Virginia.
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[T]here are differing ideas about the purpose of the roads radiating from Chaco Canyon across the desert for as far as fifty miles. Some archaeologists think these roads were for ceremonial purposes only, connecting Chaco Canyon to sacred places on the landscape. Others think they were primarily avenues of trade and communication between the canyon and outlying colony towns. Still others believe they may have served both purposes.
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Preliminary results suggest that the early building period in Chaco Canyon, circa 900 AD, employed trees from many different sites. During the peak building period a century later, all logs used carried the same concentrations of trace elements and, therefore, probably came from the same forest. Durand's next step is to locate this forest and figure out how the builders of Chaco Canyon, theAnasazi, managed to tote the logs, some weighing 600 pounds, 50 miles or more.
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