CHACO CULTURE NATIONAL HISTORIC PARK NEW MEXICO PUEBLO BONITO PLEASE STAY ON TRAIL Chaco Canyon National Monument was established by presidential proclamation in 1907, owing largely to the efforts of Edgar L. Hewett, Director of the Museum of New Mexico and the School of American Research, whose first of many expeditions into the canyon was in 1902. Pueblo Bonito, “the pretty village,” has been known by that name since at least as far back as 1840, and was probably named by Spanish or Mexican so

Pueblo Bonito, probably the largest single prehistoric Indian building in the Southwest at the time it was constructed, represents the highest development of Anasazi architecture. Most of the construction was between the years A.D. 1030 and 1079. The bulk of the wall’s thickness was made up of rough, unshaped random stones laid in mud mortar. Then the walls were veneered, inside and out, with the carefully fitted stone you see here. The stone used for the facing, a hard, dense sandstone, was qua

The large, broken stones here and to your left are what remain of Threatening Rock, a large vertical slab of native rock which once stood separated from the cliff by a wide crack. The people of Pueblo Bonito felt the threat of its fall, for using posts, mud, and stone masonry, they attempted to shore up the rock, or to prevent erosion of its base. Here you can see a remnant of that early attempt. The Navajos, who were not here until long after the last of the Anasazi departed, call Pueblo Bonito

The rock around you is sandstone of the Cliff House formation, a member of the Mesaverde group of sedimentary rocks laid down in Cretaceous times—70 to 80 million years ago—near the edge of a shallow sea. When the shoreline retreated and the waters became shallower, and fresh or brackish, the sediments were in the form of carbonaceous shale and coal which are exposed across the canyon. The Indians made no use of the coal as fuel, but jet and shale from that formation were made into figurines, be

Here is an overall view of Pueblo Bonito and the more than three acres it covers. The panels in front of you describe the construction sequences. An existing southeast-facing pueblo was used as the nucleus for the grander multi-storied Pueblo Bonito. The symmetry of the ground plan indicates that a well-conceived basic plan was adhered to throughout three generations of remodeling and enlarging. We don’t know the exact number of rooms the pueblo contained because many of the upper walls had fall

This broken section of wall shows its construction of a core of rough stone faced with smaller, selected stones, each having at least three plane surfaces. Note that the wall is thick at the bottom where the entire weight was carried, but is narrower at the top where less strength was needed. The tapering is evidence of prior planning—the builders knew when they started that they were going to build four to five stories—but the wall was not erected as a single operation. As the height for each s

You are standing near the ceiling level of the ground floor rooms. Rock debris and silting from the canyon wall has buried the lower part of the house. By referring to the ground plan at the front of the booklet you can see that this section of the wall is a “curtain wall” with a narrow, triangular space behind it. Visible in the masonry are the butts of small poles used as tie rods that bridge the opening behind the wall. The space was not a room, but was filled to lend strength to the juncture

You may walk into this small ground floor storeroom to inspect the original ceiling. The doorway was once plugged with masonry, but it was opened by an early explorer. This section of the pueblo is part of the first construction of Pueblo Bonito behind the older pueblo of the A.D. 900’s. Tree-ring dates from the Ponderosa pine vigas indicate that the room was built in A.D. 1038. Peeled willow sticks were laid across the beams and covered with juniper bark, and finally about six inches of packed

The rooms surrounding you are part of the old, southeast-facing pueblo, built between 919 and about 936, over and around which the grander Pueblo Bonito was built 100 years later. Note the cruder masonry and thinner walls. The vertical poles incorporated into the wall in front of you represent an earlier method of construction. Often the poles supported a matting or wattle of small branches which served as lath to hold a thin wall of mud plaster. Later the people used small posts as a frame for

This open area is the plaza or courtyard. It served much the same function as a town square where ceremonial dances and other group activities took place. Also, when weather permitted, much of the daily domestic work was done here—shelling corn, twisting cordage, scraping hides, firing pottery, and fashioning tools of stone, bone and wood. The plaza was divided by a single row of rooms into two courts. Many grinding stones were found in these rooms which served as one of two community centers fo

The round underground room, a bit over 45 feet in diameter at the floor, is a great kiva which served as a religious center. Its roof, supported by four rubble-filled masonry columns, was 9 feet 7 inches above the floor. Thirty-four niches around the wall above the upper bench may once have held offerings of jewelry and other valued materials, but were open and empty at the time of excavation. The chamber was entered at the north end by a series of stone steps. You may enter and examine in detai

The ordinary kivas let down into this raised terrace served smaller groups than the great kiva. In today’s Pueblo villages kivas are used as meeting places by both male and female members of curing societies, as workshops for making ritual equipment, for dance rehearsal, and as sleeping places for boys while they are receiving religious instruction. Kivas were more numerous than great kivas—37 have been identified in Pueblo Bonito—though not all were usable at one time. The kiva on the left was

These ground floor rooms were used for storage and were reached from the living rooms above them by means of ladders through open hatchways in the ceiling. Doorways were closed by leaning large, flat slabs of ground sandstone against sloping collars of masonry in the jambs, or by suspending matting from small sticks in the lintel....

The fire-reddened walls in this room resulted from a fire that destroyed the ceiling. The unburned area near the floor shows that the fire occurred after abandonment of the rooms. The earthen floors of the rooms above had leaked through and piled up against these walls. Tree-ring dates from charred beams fallen to the floor indicate construction at about A.D. 1100—one of the last additions to be built. The room had been left empty except for three scrapers made from deer bone. Each was beautiful

The three doorways in this room have been successively modified by adding new sills, lintels, and secondary jambs, sloped to accommodate door slabs. The doors may seem small but they were not made for ease of passage, but rather for reduced heat-loss and to make them easier to close off. In fact, the doors of the great Chacoan pueblos were unusually large for Anasazi houses. Typical doorways for the period were narrower and with high sills. The mud plaster on the south wall is original....

The doorway in the east wall was plugged with masonry. Such sealed-off doors were common and probably for a variety of reasons as the use of rooms changed and apartments were rearranged. Sometimes grain-storage rooms were temporarily closed with quickly-laid, crude masonry and mortar to render them rodent-proof. Series of doorways [photo by Hal Malde] Almost ten feet below this floor is the floor of a kiva which was part of an earlier version of Bonito’s town plan. It was filled and buried by th

The T-shaped doorway, though not common, is found from Colorado and Utah south into the mountains of northern Mexico. We can only speculate about its purpose. Of the 32 T-doors remaining in Pueblo Bonito, most are exterior doors facing kiva courts....

This well-preserved ceiling is the original one. The fresh-looking sawed ends and notches in the beams is where sections were removed for tree-ring dating. The small round holes, less destructive of the timber, are made with a hollow auger bit which removed a core—the preferred method of taking samples. Seven dates were obtained from the cores and sections in this room. Three of them were cutting dates, indicating the last year of the growth of the trees: A.D. 1077, 1078, and 1079. The construct

Above and to the left of the rooms you have just left is another corner window. On the morning of the winter solstice in December the rays of the rising sun shine through this window and strike the opposite corner of the room behind it, a fact that is probably more than coincidental. We know that in the 11th century Indians in Mexico were making solar and lunar observations and calculations that were in some respects more sophisticated than were possible in most of Europe. The long low ridge in

1) Just west of Pueblo Bonito is PUEBLO DEL ARROYO where you can see the ruins of a smaller communal house occupied at the same time. 2) Across the canyon, on the CASA RINCONADA TRAIL, you can go down into the largest great kiva in Chaco Canyon, and you can inspect three small pueblos. 3) One-half mile east is CHETRO KETL, the second largest of the great pueblos, with some features not seen at Pueblo Bonito. 4) Four miles east, up the canyon, is the VISITORS’ CENTER with restrooms, a museum, and