FAMILIA DIVERTIDO A PUEBLO BONITO

Notice how thick the walls are. I believe that these are some of the walls where the Chacoans erected 2 walls with space between, and then filled the space in with gravel, to make a 3-layered wall on which they could build more stories of rooms.

Also, notice the timbers. Many, if not most, of the logs for the great houses were carried from the Chuska and San Mateo Mountains, about 50 to 70 miles away. Keep in mind, this was a culture which had no wheeled vessels and did not use pack animals. No rivers dependably flow from the forests to here. Apparently the logs (more than 200,000 of them for the entirety of Chaco Canyon) were all carried by teams of men.

There is evidence of considerable planning: Apparently the logs were often cut and stockpiled in the mountains, where they were allowed to dry before being carried down to a pre-determined construction site.

Also, while its hard for me to believe it, apparently most of the timbers present here are the original ones. There are a few places where it is obvious that archaeologists and / or planners from the Park Service have reinforced / rebuilt structures -- primarily to improve drainage, decrease chances of walls falling over, etc. But there are also places, some of which are pointed out in the interpretive pamphlets, where core samples have been taken from logs to allow dating. it amazes me, even in this dry climate, that logs (keeping in mind that this is before "pressure treating" and other such preservation techniques were used) cut and placed around 1,000 years ago (sometimes longer) are not totally disintegrated.

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