URBAN GENESIS AT CHACO: Case Study of the Origin of Civilizations Chapters: 1 2 3 4 5 6

1.1 Introduction

One thousand years ago the Chaco Culture fluorished on the high desert plateaus between the Rio Grande and the Colorado rivers.  The culture developed a unique style of architecture and site design, beginning in the tenth century.  Over the next two hundred years the Chacoans built and reshaped scores of sites across the region and created a network of roads to link the outlying communities to the cultural center at Chaco. The variety of Chacoan architecture indicates great cultural complexity.  In addition, vast resources were imported to Chaco: especially timber, ceramics, game, and turquoise.  The Chacoan material culture is evidence of regional economic and social integration.  It also indicates the organizational capacity to maintain the regional system.  The sophisticated designs, specialized building types, and extension of Chacoan design-control over a large region all indicate that the Chacoan cultural system was operating as some form of politically organized state by the early eleventh century.

American Southwest; Chaco Region boxed.

The Chaco culture collapsed quickly and completely around AD 1115.  By about ad 1300 the canyon and most of the surrounding plateau were abandoned.  Since then, the Chaco plateau has never been significantly resettled.  Chacoan roads, shrines, dams, houses, and public architecture--the entire Chacoan built landscape--was left more or less undisturbed for the next seven hundred years.

Preface/Index

© 2000-3 Pietro Calogero. Based on U.C. Berkeley Planning Master's Thesis, May 1994.

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CHAPTER 1 BIBLIOGRAPHY

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