The ceremonial and economic heart of the Ancestral Puebloan world, where multi-storied great houses of dressed sandstone rose in a barren desert canyon and a network of dead-straight roads bound 150 outlier communities across the San Juan Basin.
Drought and the failure of the regional system emptied the canyon after ~1140; power shifted north to Aztec and Salmon, and the people dispersed to Mesa Verde and the Rio Grande, ancestors of today's Pueblos.
The atlas holds 3 border frames for Chaco Canyon (Ancestral Puebloan) — the shape you scrub through changes in 850 · 1041 · 1141.
Essays by leading scholars on the Chaco great houses, roads, and outlier system.
Synthetic history of the Ancestral Puebloan Southwest centered on Chaco (broad regional context).