Here are some old photos of Chaco Canyon I just now got around to uploading to Flickr.
Here are some old photos of Chaco Canyon I just now got around to uploading to Flickr.
Yesterday, Strix and I went on a tour of Salmon Ruins, named after the family that owned the land that the ruins are found on in the late 1800's. It's now a County Park, maintained by a non-profit organization.
They have a lot of educational presentations at the ruins, so they built this small amphitheater for that purpose. The buildings in the forground are part of a park with reproductions of frontier-era buildings that are between the visitor's center and the ruins.
More pics of some of the reproduction buildings.
This is the north wall of the ruins. It shows the typical banding style of Chacoan architecture.
A detail of the east wall of the ruins, which shows a more intricate banding.
The interior of one of the rooms.
A kiva is a round room, used for ceremonial purposes by Chacoan and Anasazi peoples, as well as modern Hopi. Many of the kivas at the Salmon ruins site were added by the inhabitants after the fact, so they are square rooms that were built out into round rooms with additional roof support. The cobbling visible in the foreground of the picture is from the newer wall, built after the Chacoans had already exhausted much of the good stone in the area that could be chipped into standard sizes, so they used larger, rounder stones whole.
This detail of the corner of the kiva shows the space that was created by building a round room within a square one.
A broader view of some of the ruins.
Another late-built kiva, built inside a standard cell.
Another broad shot of the ruins.
A couple shots down into the rooms. Chacoan structures were like apartment buildings, with multiple rooms conjoined and access from one room to the next, even with multiple floors. These ruins were originally two, possibly three stories.
A view of the visitor's center from the ruins. It was built to resemble a stand-alone kiva.
This view of some of the excavated rooms shows holes in the adjoining wall where the roof/floor supports were for the second floor.
The position of this window in one of the first-story rooms, with its slanted sill, marked this room as an observatory. It is positioned to align with the sun on the Summer Solstice, allowing the inhabitants to mark the changing of the seasons. There is a great deal of archaeo-astronomy used in the study of Chacoan habitats.
Thsi wall was reconstructed to match the original style. It's a good example of the small chinking between the larger stones.
Great Kivas are often stand-alone structures. This one is a good fifty feet across.
Another top down view of the excavated rooms.
A tower kiva central to the ruins.
The outline of a floor pit can be seen on the left side of the image. Kivas typically have two of these. In modern Hopi rituals, these are used as foot drums. Boards are put over the pits and when stomped upon they make a drum-like sound. It has also been hypothesized that these were seed germination pits.
In this room, the flat wall was carved out, and the beginnings of a round wall was constructed. Our archaeologist guide surmised that they had started to put a kiva in this room, and for some reason abandoned the project.
A couple more kiva shots.
It's hard to see, but the stone structure down in the kiva here is the remains of an upright deflector. A fire would normally be burning in the center of the kiva, and the deflector was used to keep sparks from entering the primary air vent.
A couple more shots of the great kiva.
A view of the ruins from the edge of the great kiva.
Just a cactus I saw on the very steep walkway back to the visitor's center.
]]>Yesterday: Blue Mesa
This continues the documentation of our recent trip to the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona.
This is a pull-off north of the Blue Mesa area in the park called Tepees. There are no actual tepees here, but I guess someone thought that the badland formations here looked like tepees. They are somewhat pyramid-like. This is also a virtual geocache, so I took a pic of Strix standing in the foreground holding our GPS to prove we were there.
Our next stop was Puerco Pueblo, which is a small ruins area in the park. No, I don't know why it's called Pig Village, though there is a Rio Puerco that runs through New Mexico and joins into the Colorado River, which of course runs through Arizona. But then the question is why is the river called Pig River? There are some questions we are not meant to answer.
The ruins site is not much to see after you've been to Chaco Canyon, but it's still interesting.
Petroglyphs found at the Puerco Pueblo site.
This is a detail of one of the pics above. This has to be the most humorous petroglyph I've ever seen. Strix calls this one, "I said put me down!" Did the "artist" mean for it to be funny? Was it a horror story about a thirty-foot tall bird that ate humans? Is, in fact, this an attempt at perspective, and the man is actually supposed to be in the background? We'll never know.
Tomorrow: Route 66 Monument
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