A truly remarkable transformation in settlement patterns occurred in the San Juan basin in northwestern New Mexico in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, with small household farmsteads giving way to aggregated communities centered on communal masonry buildings that are now called “great houses.”These structures are found throughout the basin but are concentrated in Chaco Canyon, where several examples contained hundreds of rooms and reached four stories in height. The largest great house is Pueblo Bonito, with over 600 rooms covering two acres. The entire episode of great house construction in Chaco, the Bonito phase (A.D. 900-1140), was obviously a time of immense cooperative effort. At least 200,000 wooden beams averaging 5 meters long and 20 centimeters in diameter were brought to the canyon from distances between 40 and 100 kilometers away to build a dozen great houses, signifying a huge labor investment and a complex production process. The bulk of construction took place in the eleventh century, but by A.D. 1140 it had ceased abruptly, after which there was a rapid decline in use of the great houses and apparent abandonment of the canyon in the thirteenth century.

For more than a century archaeologists have struggled to understand the circumstances surrounding the rise and collapse of Chacoan society –dubbed the Chaco Phenomenon. In particular, research has focused on determining why such an apparently inhospitable place as Chaco, which today is extremely arid and has very short growing seasons, should have favored the concentration of labor that must have been required for such massive construction projects over brief periods of time. Until the 1970s, it was widely assumed that Chaco had been a forested oasis that attracted farmers who initially flourished but eventually fell victim to their own success and exuberance, as they denuded the canyon of trees and vegetation to build large great houses. In the 1980s this reconstruction was largely dismissed in response to evidence that there had never been a forest in Chaco, and that canyon soils had poor agricultural potential. As scientific interpretations about Chaco changed, the focus of explanatory models changed from the attractiveness of the canyon for farmers to the position of the canyon within a regional network of dispersed agricultural communities.

The adoption of a regional perspective in explaining the Chaco Phenomenon was based in part on the discovery of formal trails connecting many of the great houses in Chaco, as well as linking the canyon to smaller great house located throughout the San Juan basin, the latter are referred to as Chaco “outliers.” These trails are densest around the concentration of great houses in the center, and the canyon itself is roughly at the center of the basin. Consequently, the canyon occupies the geographical and social center of the network formed by the connecting trails. The current consensus view is that religion provides the fundamental explanation for this centrifugal pattern.

Archaeologists now describe Chaco during the Bonito phase as a location of high devotional expression and the pilgrimage center of a sacred landscape. These descriptions emphasize aspects of the archaeological record presumed to be associated with ritual activity, including caches of turquoise beads and pendants, unusual ceramic vessels and wooden objects, several rooms with multiple human burials, and especially the large number of kivas (multipurpose rooms used for religious, political, and social functions) found in great houses. Most of these indicators occur only at Pueblo bonito, but archaeologists generally assume that all the great houses had a similar ritual function. In fact, some scholars have suggested that the great houses were temples rather than residences.

However, new geological field studies in Chaco have produced results that may require a significant reassessment of the assumption that the canyon was not a favorable agricultural setting. It appears that during the first half of the eleventh century, during the extraordinary boom in construction, a large volume of water and suspended sediment flowed into the canyon. A large natural lake may have existed at the western end of Chaco, near the biggest concentration of great houses. The presence of large quantities of water and, equally important, a source of sediment that replenished agricultural fields, presumably made the canyon an extremely attractive place for newly arriving people from the northern San Juan River basin.