Chaco Canyon National Historical Park, in NM

From AD 850 to 1250, Chaco Canyon served as a major urban center of ancestral Puebloan culture. Remarkable for its monumental public and ceremonial buildings, engineering feats, astronomy, artistic achievements, and distinctive architecture, it served as a hub of ceremony, trade, and administration for the prehistoric Four Corners area for 400 years--unlike anything before or since.

Chaco Culture National Historical Park preserves one of America's most significant and fascinating cultural and historic areas. It was a major center of ancestral Puebloan culture between AD 850 and 1250 and was a hub of ceremony, trade, and administration for the prehistoric Four Corners area - unlike anything before or since.

Chaco is remarkable for its monumental public and ceremonial buildings, and its distinctive architecture. To construct the buildings, along with the associated Chacoan roads, ramps, dams, and mounds, required a great deal of well organized and skillful planning, designing, resource gathering, and construction. The Chacoan people combined pre-planned architectural designs, astronomical alignments, geometry, landscaping, and engineering to create an ancient urban center of spectacular public architecture - one that still amazes and inspires us a thousand years later.