Pueblo Bonito: Center of the Chacoan World

Pueblo Bonito is the largest and most famous ruin in New Mexico’s Chaco Culture National Historical Park. Built by the ancestral Puebloan people some 1000 years ago, the ruin testifies to one of the oldest and most complex societies ever discovered in North America. Study of the large corpus of data continues to generate new ideas about the people who lived there and their way of life. This extensively illustrated volume commemorates the recent centennial of the first large-scale excavations at Pueblo Bonito, with leading experts writing on various aspects of the site, including its setting, construction sequence and labour requirements, possible astronomical orientations and related rituals, and burials. The book probes deeply for answers to several perplexing questions: How were the people of Pueblo Bonito organized socially? What exactly was the vast structure used for? At four stories tall with as many as 800 rooms, was it a residential structure for an elite population, a ceremonial centre, or both? Finally, how many people inhabited this magnificent edifice and what can that tell us about the Chacoan society as a whole?