What a hundred and five artifacts and two hundred thousand artifacts tell you about how we decide what’s worth looking at
There are two mounds in front of Pueblo Bonito.
They stand almost twenty feet high, in the open ground south of the great house. For most of a century the professional term for them was trash mounds.
This is about what that word did.
Start with the building
Pueblo Bonito sits in Chaco Canyon, San Juan County, northwestern New Mexico. It was built and rebuilt in planned stages between roughly AD 850 and 1150 by Ancestral Puebloan people.
How many rooms is a live question. You will see 500, 650, 750, and 800 in reputable sources, depending on who’s counting and whether collapsed and unexcavated rooms are included. Recent scholarship tends toward roughly 650. However you count, it was the largest structure anyone raised in this hemisphere north of Mexico, and it stood multiple stories, five, by most estimates.
The walls are core-and-veneer: two faces of carefully fitted stone with a rubble-and-mortar core between. That’s not improvisation. It’s a system, and it produces walls thick enough to carry multiple floors.
Brian Fagan has called Pueblo Bonito an archaeological icon on the level of Stonehenge, Teotihuacan, and Machu Picchu.
And it went up without wheels, without draft animals, and without metal tools.
Two hundred and forty thousand trees
Here is the fact that should reframe the whole canyon.
Chaco is high desert. In the photographs you see rock, scrub, and sky. Paleoenvironmental reconstruction shows it wasn’t much different during the Chacoan era — there were never enough conifers in the canyon to supply the demand.
The great houses consumed more than two hundred and forty thousand construction timbers.
In 2015, a team led by Christopher Guiterman applied tree-ring-width sourcing to 170 great-house beams, the first use of that method in the Southwest. Seventy percent came from the Chuska and Zuni Mountains, both more than seventy-five kilometers away. More than fifty miles.
And the sourcing shifted. Before 1020 CE nearly all the timber came from the Zunis. By 1060 the Chuskas had eclipsed them.
Earlier strontium isotope work had already placed beams in the Chuska and San Mateo ranges and notably not in the San Pedro Mountains, which are equally close. Logs from two different sources turn up in the same room, in the same great house, cut in the same year.
Taken together, the harvesting area covers roughly seventy-five hundred square miles. Larger than Rhode Island and Connecticut combined.
Read the San Pedro detail again, because it’s the one that matters. They were not taking the nearest wood. They were taking wood from specific places and skipping other places that were just as close. That’s not resource extraction. That’s a relationship with particular mountains, maintained across generations, and the cutting dates show it was happening nearly every year without a gap.
Nobody was living in most of it
Six hundred fifty rooms, or eight hundred. And somewhere between fifty and sixty burials recovered from the entire structure.
A building that size, occupied across three centuries, should have produced a cemetery. It produced dozens of graves.
The 2017 Nature Communications paper on Room 33 notes why in passing, and the detail is directly relevant to this article: interment inside Chacoan settlements was unusual. Most people were buried outside, in mounds of domestic debris.
Hold onto that.
Room 33
There is one spectacular exception to the burial problem.
Room 33 is a small interior chamber, roughly six feet by six feet, accessible only through a hatch in the roof. It was excavated in 1896 and it held fourteen burials.
Beneath a wooden plank floor, two men, one below the other. The lowermost had more than eleven thousand turquoise beads and thirty-three hundred shell beads heaped around him, along with abalone shells and a conch shell trumpet from the Pacific or the Gulf of California. It is the richest burial ever found in the American Southwest. A plank floor was laid over the two of them, and more bodies were interred above.
He was a man in his forties, and his skull had a gash in it. Stephen Plog reads that as a blow struck in a fight. Erin Marden thinks it more likely someone (possibly a looter) broke the skull after burial. That disagreement is unresolved and worth keeping unresolved.
In 2017, Douglas Kennett, Plog, and colleagues published DNA analysis of nine of the fourteen. All nine mitochondrial genomes were identical, belonging to a B2y1 haplotype. Nuclear DNA from six of them identified a mother and daughter, and a grandmother and grandson.
The conclusion: a single elite matriline held a central leadership role at Pueblo Bonito for approximately three hundred and thirty years.
Kennett was careful about what that does and doesn’t mean. Not a state-level society, but, in his words, not egalitarian either. Plog called it the best evidence of social hierarchy in the ancient Southwest.
The part of that story that belongs in this series
The Room 33 research was widely hailed as a technical achievement. It also drew criticism, not only on interpretation, but on process. Some scientists objected that the team did not consult Indigenous groups before conducting the analysis.
Five of the fourteen individuals in Room 33 yielded no DNA and may not belong to the same maternal line at all. Without comparative DNA from other rooms at Pueblo Bonito and elsewhere in the canyon, it isn’t possible to say whether the Room 33 group was unique.
I’m including this because it’s the same pattern as everything else on this page. Someone made a decision about whose questions get answered and whose consent gets asked, and the decision has consequences that outlast it. In 1896 the decision was that these remains were specimens. In 2017 the decision was that descendants didn’t need to be part of the conversation. The technology changed enormously. The posture changed less.
The roads
Radiating out from Chaco is a network of constructed roads, roughly thirty feet wide.
They run straight. Not efficient-straight, refusing-to-deviate straight. Where terrain rises, the road doesn’t go around. Ramps and stairways were carved into bedrock.
Archaeologists genuinely disagree about what they were for: transportation and trade infrastructure, or formal processional ways. Thirty feet is extravagant for foot traffic, and there were no wheeled vehicles to require it.
Along those routes came seashell, chert, obsidian, cacao, copper bells from Mexico, and live macaws from Mesoamerica. Birds carried alive over five hundred miles.
Who named it
In 1849, a US Army expedition under Lieutenant James H. Simpson came through the canyon. Simpson’s guide was a man named Carravahal, from San Ysidro, and it was Carravahal who supplied the Spanish names that stuck, including Pueblo Bonito, “beautiful town.”
The names on every sign and in every book came from a guide on a military reconnaissance, in a language belonging to neither the builders nor their descendants.
Before modern archaeology existed
Beginning in 1896, the Hyde Exploring Expedition excavated at Pueblo Bonito on behalf of the American Museum of Natural History, with Richard Wetherill in the field. Room 33 came out of that work.
The operation was eventually shut down by the federal government amid complaints about the scale of artifact removal, and the controversy contributed to the passage of the Antiquities Act in 1906. Wetherill later homesteaded at Chaco and ran a trading post there; he was shot and killed in 1910 in circumstances that were disputed then and remain so.
What isn’t disputed is that Pueblo Bonito was substantially emptied before modern excavation method existed.
Judd’s trenches
In the 1920s, Neil Judd ran excavations at Pueblo Bonito.
Judd turned to the two mounds and cut three trenches, one through each mound, one through the space between.
He collected about a hundred and five artifacts. They went to the American Museum of Natural History, where they remain.
Then he backfilled the trenches with the material he had excavated.
That is the entire story of the mounds for the next eighty years. A hundred and five objects, and a label.
What was actually in there
Between 2004 and 2007, a University of New Mexico team directed by W. H. Wills conducted six field sessions at Pueblo Bonito. New excavation in the park is heavily restricted, so they worked where prior disturbance already existed.
They re-excavated Judd’s trenches.
Not new ground. His backfill. The same dirt, from the same holes, already dug once and put back.
They recovered approximately two hundred thousand artifacts. Ceramics, lithics, bone, and other material.
Now the methodological point, because someone will raise it and they’ll be right to.
Much of that gap is definition, not negligence. Judd was collecting objects, things recognizable as artifacts by 1925 standards. The UNM team screened soil and counted everything through the mesh: every sherd, every flake, every fragment of bone. Two different questions, two different numbers.
But that is the point, and it’s more interesting than carelessness.
What counts as evidence changed. And everything that didn’t count in 1925 went back into the hole, unrecorded, because the category it had been assigned to meant nobody needed to count it.
Is it trash?
Here I have to be careful, because the exciting version of this story is not the true one.
The exciting version: they called it garbage, but it was really a sacred platform, and the establishment buried it.
That is not what the research says.
The actual state of the debate is that specialists disagree about whether the Pueblo Bonito mounds are expedient refuse middens, deliberately constructed platform mounds, or something in between. The UNM team’s own 2021 paper on the mounds’ formation history argues they do not reflect institutionalized political power of the kind assumed for platform mounds elsewhere in North America, but rather local landscape changes tied to complex social negotiation during a period of rapid transformation.
That is an unglamorous, specialist conclusion, and it is the honest one.
There is relevant evidence from the nearby great house at Pueblo Alto. Its mound, about four meters high, contains deposits that don’t match ordinary domestic refuse from residential sites. The layers appear to have been laid down periodically, in episodes, consistent with large gatherings rather than daily household discard.
Deposition that happens in events rather than continuously. Some Chaco scholars argue the making of these mounds was itself part of the ceremonial activity the canyon was known for; that the depositing was the point, not a byproduct.
And remember what the Room 33 paper said in passing. Most Chacoans were buried outside, in mounds of domestic debris.
So: material deposited in episodes, at gatherings, at a ceremonial center, in mounds that also received the dead.
Call the result a garbage dump and you have described its physical composition accurately and the human act not at all.
The thing about labels
This is the transferable lesson and it’s bigger than Chaco.
A classification is a decision about what deserves attention. Call something a midden and you have pre-answered the question of whether it merits careful excavation. The answer is no; it’s trash, we know what’s in it, take a sample, move on.
Then a century passes.
You saw the same mechanism at Pinson Mounds in Tennessee, where platform mounds “belonged” to the Mississippian period, so the Woodland-era platforms at Pinson went unrecognized until one trench in 1981 forced the issue. And at Anderson, Indiana, where the site maps used since the 1800s turned out to be wrong, meaning a century of interpretation rested on a bad drawing.
The pattern isn’t conspiracy. It’s something more ordinary and harder to fix: categories are labor-saving devices, and the labor they save is looking.
The canyon fed itself from somewhere else
A 2019 study in the Journal of Archaeological Science examined the sourcing of meat and maize at Chaco. Both were being imported.
The center of the Chacoan world was not producing its own food. It was being supplied.
Set that beside two hundred forty thousand timbers hauled from fifty miles out, turquoise and shell and cacao and live macaws arriving from Mesoamerica, and roads running out in straight lines to the horizon and Chaco looks less like a city that grew and more like something an entire region built and fed on purpose.
Which returns you to the mounds. If people came periodically, in numbers, bringing material with them, then what accumulated in front of Pueblo Bonito is a record of attendance.
What’s happening right now
This part is unfinished, which makes Chaco different from most sites in this series.
In June 2023, after a hundred and fifty days of public comment, eight public meetings, two and a half years of assessment, and nearly a decade of advocacy by tribes and conservation groups, the Interior Department withdrew more than 336,400 acres of public land within a ten-mile radius of the park from new oil and gas leasing and mining claims, for twenty years.
In January 2025, Secretarial Order 3418 directed a review of all withdrawn federal land to increase energy production. On October 30, 2025, the administration notified tribal governments it was beginning a review of the Chaco buffer. On March 31, 2026, BLM opened a public comment period on shrinking or eliminating it.
Seven days.
A hundred and fifty days of comment to create the protection. Seven days to comment on removing it. BLM signaled a preference for full revocation. A draft environmental assessment followed on July 15, 2026, with a fourteen-day comment window.
In May 2026, the National Trust for Historic Preservation named the Greater Chaco Cultural Landscape one of America’s eleven most endangered historic places nominated by the Pueblo of Acoma, supported by the All Pueblo Council of Governors.
The part nobody wants to say out loud
Here is where I’m going to disappoint anyone looking for a simple story.
This is not the federal government against Native people. It’s worse than that, because it’s a conflict between Native nations with genuinely incompatible interests.
Many Navajo allottees in the Greater Chaco region hold individual land allotments in country too arid to farm. Oil and gas royalties (on the order of twenty thousand dollars a year) are their primary income. Not supplemental. Primary.
The Navajo Nation sued the federal government in 2025 over the original withdrawal, arguing it cost allottees millions. That suit was dismissed on March 31, 2026, following a settlement. The Navajo Nation’s position has been support for shrinking the buffer to five miles rather than eliminating it; Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren has since reaffirmed support for a zero-mile buffer while calling for meaningful consultation with affected communities.
The administration has cited the Navajo economic argument to justify full revocation, going further than the Navajo Nation itself asked for.
Meanwhile the Pueblo nations (Acoma, Laguna, and the broader All Pueblo Council of Governors) hold Chaco as ancestral, sacred, and central to their identity, and oppose revocation. The Pueblos of Acoma and Laguna were not parties to the Navajo settlement and are not bound by its terms.
Descendants of the people who built Chaco want the landscape protected. Descendants of people who have lived on that land for centuries need the royalties to eat. And a federal agency is using the second group’s poverty as the argument for a policy that goes beyond what that group requested.
If you want a clean villain, you won’t find one. What you’ll find is the long tail of a century and a half of policy that put people on land that can’t feed them and then made their only asset the thing underneath it.
That deserves to be said accurately even when the accurate version is harder to be angry about.
Two mounds sit in front of the largest building raised in ancient North America. A man cut three holes in them in the 1920s, kept a hundred and five things, and put the rest back. Eighty years later someone dug the same holes and found two hundred thousand. The building above them holds a three-hundred-thirty-year matrilineal line in one six-foot room, two hundred forty thousand trees hauled from mountains fifty miles off, and roads running dead north, thirty feet wide, built by people with no wheels.
And for a hundred years, the word for the front of it was garbage.
Every conquered society gets its architecture reassigned. It happened here.
Ask yourself where else it’s happened.
There is a country buried underneath this one. And you’re standing on it right now.
GO LOOK FOR YOURSELF
National Park Service, Chaco Culture National Historical Park:
https://www.nps.gov/chcu/
The 2021 UNM paper on the mounds’ formation history:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0278416521000556
The Archaeological Conservancy on the 105-versus-200,000 comparison:
https://www.thearchcons.org/bookreviews/the-pueblo-bonito-mounds-of-chaco-canyon-material-culture-and-fauna/
Guiterman et al., PNAS – the tree-ring sourcing of 240,000 timbers:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1514272112
Smithsonian on the same research, in plain English:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/where-did-chaco-canyons-timber-come-from-180981996/
SAPIENS on the full timber picture, including the strontium studies:
https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/chaco-canyon-timber/
Kennett et al., Nature Communications – the Room 33 matriline paper itself:
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14115
Scientific American, including the criticism over Indigenous consultation:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-dna-yields-unprecedented-insights-into-mysterious-chaco-civilization/
Science News on the unresolved questions – the head wound, the five individuals with no DNA:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/chaco-canyons-ancient-civilization-continues-puzzle
Penn Museum on great houses, berms, and the Pueblo Alto deposits:
https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/the-bluff-great-house/
On the drilling buffer – all sides:
E&E News on the start of the review:
https://www.eenews.net/articles/interior-considers-revoking-chaco-canyon-drilling-ban/
Santa Fe New Mexican on the seven-day comment period:
https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/blm-opens-comment-period-on-proposal-to-shrink-or-remove-chaco-canyon-buffer-zone/article_fd1a4dca-7e0f-46a4-9761-118acf65f6cc.html
The Navajo allottee position and the settlement:
https://moabsunnews.com/2026/04/13/interior-moves-to-revoke-drilling-protections-around-chaco-canyon/
Pueblo leaders and the congressional delegation:
https://searchlightnm.org/pueblo-leaders-federal-lawmakers-ramp-up-calls-to-keep-chaco-drilling-buffer/
The case for revocation, royalty figures and the allottee argument:
https://fulcher.house.gov/?p=5207
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