LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Chaco Canyon: Pueblo Bonito
built 634 days ago
Between AD 850 and 1250, Chaco Canyon was a major center of ancestral Puebloan culture. Many diverse clans and peoples helped to create a ceremonial, trade, and administrative center whose architecture, social organization and community life was unlike anything before or since.
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Pueblo Bonito is the most celebrated of the Chaco Canyon great houses. Over time, workers shaped an estimated one million blocks of sandstone weighing some thirty thousand tons to construct Pueblo Bonito. Along its back perimeter, the rooms stood five stories high. At its peak, Pueblo Bonita had seven hundred or more rooms, thirty-seven family kivas, and two community kivas. Built in several stages, Pueblo Bonita covered over four- and one-half acres. A study by University of Arizona researchers showed the workers hauled spruce and fir timbers more than fifty miles to construct the floors and roofs.
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The Great Kiva - In Chaco Canyon, most of the towns are located along the north side of Chaco Wash, and their kivas are an integral part of their structure. On the south side of Chaco Wash stands Casa Rinconada... called the Great Kiva. This kiva is more than twice the size of any other in the canyon. It stands among a small set of ruins that were crudely built as compared with the Great Kiva and the pueblos on the north bank. It is speculated that Casa Rinconada was a ceremonial center for all of the communities in the canyon.
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Una Vida is one of the pueblo ruins located in Chaco Canyon and closest to the visitor center. Construction began about 850 A.D. and continued until it was abandoned along with Pueblo Bonito and Penasco Blanco.
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The central portion of the canyon contains the largest Chacoan complexes. The most studied is Pueblo Bonito ("Beautiful Village"); covering almost 2 acres (8,000 m²) and comprising at least 650 rooms, it is the largest Great House; in parts of the complex, the structure was four stories high. The builders' use of core-and-veneer architecture and multi-story construction necessitated massive masonry walls up to 3 feet (1 m) thick. Pueblo Bonito is divided into two sections by a wall precisely aligned to run north-south, bisecting the central plaza. A Great Kiva was placed on either side of the wall, creating a symmetrical pattern common to many Chacoan Great Houses. The complex, upon completion, was roughly the size of the Roman Colosseum.[42]
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Pueblo Bonito