Chaco Canyon

Chaco Canyon National Park is location in northwestern New Mexico. Chaco Canyon features high-desert landscape, long winters, short growing seasons, and marginal rainfall, creating an unlikely place for a major center of ancestral Puebloan culture to take root and flourish. Yet this valley was the center of a thriving culture a thousand years ago. The monumental scale of its architecture, the complexity of its community life, the high level of its community social organization, and its far-reaching commerce created a cultural vision unlike any other seen before or since.