Chaco Canyon

Ancestral Pueblo people built great houses of stone with hundreds of rooms in a dry canyon in New Mexico, linked to the land around by straight roads. Some walls line up with the sun and moon.

Date: About AD 850 to 1150VII · After the empiresVIII · Medieval networks and empires
Place: Pueblo Bonito · Fajada Butte · Aztec RuinsThe Americas
Laid out as: A siteOne place known mainly from digging, read layer by layer from the top down.
Lessons: 6 planned, none written yet
Image: The Met Open Access, CC0
Themes: Transport, towns and building works
Science and mathematics
Religion, belief and myth

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

IPueblo Bonito
IIRoads that run straight
IIIThe sun dagger
IVChocolate and macaws
VLeaving Chaco
VIThe Pueblo peoples today

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

Edgar Lee Hewett

Objects

Cylinder jars
Macaw feathers and skeletons

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestry Our species and the Old Stone Age Farming and the New Stone Age First cities and the Bronze Age The Iron Age and growing states The classical world After the empires Medieval networks and empires Oceans crossed Revolutions and the first factories Industry, empire and world war The world since 1945

AD 850 to 1150. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?