THE ARCHITECTURE OF PUEBLO BONITO 



By Neil M. Judd 



Associate in Anthropology, U. S. National Museum 

 Smithsonian Institution 



(With 81 Plates) 



I. INTRODUCTION AND CONCLUSIONS 



This is a story of the growth and dedine of a single prehistoric 

 village, Pueblo Bonito. It will have very little to say of other vil- 

 lages, historic or prehistoric. It is a story primarily of houses and 

 house building. By adding to data previously published it seeks to 

 portray the manner in which a twofold Indian community rose to 

 preeminence and thereafter gradually fell apart and was lost. 



Pueblo Bonito is the ruin of an Indian apartment house in Chaco 

 Canyon, northwestern New Mexico (fig. 1). Built and occupied 

 between A.D. 900 and 1100, it is one of 15 major ruins whose 

 preservation was intended by President Theodore Roosevelt when 

 he created the Chaco Canyon National Monument, March 11, 1907. 

 Of these, Pueblo Bonito is at once the largest, the oldest, and the most 

 famous (pi. 1). 



Chaco Canyon, site of Pueblo Bonito, is a 15-mile-long section of 

 the Chaco River. Cliff House sandstone walls the canyon on either 

 side, but the river is a river in name only. Water flows through it 

 only during the annual rainy season when floods may race its full 

 length, a hundred miles from the Continental Divide to its conflu- 

 ence with the Rio San Juan. Half a mile or more in width, the 

 canyon has never known a perennial stream, although it has sheltered 

 diverse primitive folk from the ancient Basket Makers to the nomadic 

 Navaho. Most advanced of these were the so-called Pueblo III 

 peoples, builders of Pueblo Bonito, 14 other major communities, and 

 numerous smaller settlements. 



Over the centuries flood waters have half filled Chaco Canyon 

 with alluvium washed in from higher ground and at least twice have 

 carved a watercourse, or arroyo, through that fill. Latest of these 

 arroyos, 30 feet deep and 100 to 300 feet wide as we measured it, 

 originated about 1850 and has since literally washed away at least 



SMITHSONIAN MISCELUNEOUS COLLECTIONS, VOL. 147, NO. 1 



