Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico is home to some of the most complex ruins in the United States. At a time (ca. A.D. 950) when everyone else in the American Southwest was building small one-story apartments of five to ten rooms, the people of Chaco Canyon started building massive stone buildings as much as five stories high with some 800 rooms. Eight of these Great Houses are found in the canyon. This occurred in a very inhospitable place that gets about eight inches of rainfall annually and has virtually no trees. More than 200,000 beams were brought into the canyon to build the massive structures. Over 150 communities known as outliers surround Chaco, some of which are 90 miles away.
For more than 100 years archaeologists have studied and excavated the Chacoan ruins, but today there is still no agreement as to who and what produced this phenomenon. Recently the National Park Service sponsored the Chaco Synthesis Project to bring Chacoan scholars together to tackle the perplexing problems. Archaeologist and writer Brian Fagan, who is not a Chaco scholar, collected that material in this new volume for the general reader. A talented writer, Fagan has produced a general history of the Chaco culture and of the archaeologists who have labored to understand it. It is a big topic to cover and Fagan does a good job even though he slights some of the most interesting aspects of the Chacoan system like the importance of the outliers and the sophisticated astronomical observatories.
Clearly Fagan is more comfortable with a conservative interpretation of Chaco that largely dismisses newer, more original interpretations. He also minimizes how different Chaco was from the rest of the Pueblo universe. Nonetheless, Chaco Canyon is a very useful work, one visitors to the canyon will certainly want to study before making the trip. However, we can be confident that it is not the last word on this magnificent American phenomenon.
