Chaco Canyon great houses rise

1000

On the windswept New Mexican plateau, Ancestral Puebloans aligned multi-story sandstone buildings to the solstice sun and carved roads running straight for miles over broken mesa country. Pueblo Bonito's growing D-shape would eventually enclose seven hundred rooms under a single sweeping roof. Turquoise from distant mines and macaw feathers from Mesoamerica arrived along trade routes that stretched across the arid Southwest.