Scientist Tries to Connect Migration Dots of Ancient Southwest

CASAS GRANDES, Mexico — From the sky, the Mound of the Cross at Paquimé, a 14th-century ruin in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, looks like a compass rose — the roundish emblem indicating the cardinal directions on a map. About 30 feet in diameter and molded from compacted earth and rock taken near the banks of the Casas Grandes River, the crisscross arms point to four circular platforms. They might as well be labeled N, S, E and W.

“It’s a hell of a long way from here to Chaco,” says Steve Lekson, an archaeologist from the University of Colorado, as he sights along the north-south spoke of the cross. Follow his gaze 400 miles north and you reach Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico, a major cultural center occupied from about A.D. 900 to A.D. 1150 by the pueblo people known as Anasazi. Despite the distance, Dr. Lekson believes the two sites were linked by an ancient pattern of migration and a common set of religious beliefs.

But don’t stop at Chaco. Continue about 60 miles northward along the same straight line and you come to another Anasazi center called Aztec Ruins. For Dr. Lekson the alignment must be more than a coincidence.

A decade ago in “The Chaco Meridian: Centers of Political Power in the Ancient Southwest,” he argued that for centuries the Anasazi leaders, reckoning by the stars, aligned their principal settlements along this north-south axis — the 108th meridian of longitude. In an article this year for Archaeology magazine, he added two older ruins to the trajectory: Shabik’eschee, south of Chaco, and Sacred Ridge, north of Aztec. Each in its time was the regional focus of economic and political power, and each lies along the meridian. As one site was abandoned, because of drought, violence, environmental degradation — the reasons are obscure — the leaders led an exodus to a new location: sometimes north, sometimes south, but hewing as closely as they could to the 108th meridian.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/science/30chaco.html?th&emc=th

Always interesting to read theories about this culture.

I see the cliff dwelling ruins in the Gila Wilderness not far from Silver City, NM are also along that line, but date later than Chaco.

http://www.google.com/search?q=ChacoMeridian+placemarks+GPS

"Mt. Wilson, one of the highest peaks in the Rockies, is also on the meridian. I named the concentration the "Chaco Meridian" and noticed that the arc distance from Pueblo Bonito to Mount Wilson precisely equals 1/200th of the circumference of the earth, or 1.80 modern degrees. Likewise, of course, for the latitude difference from Mt. Wilson to Pueblo Bonito and Chetro Ketl....."

It was a signpost, an observatory, and a ceremonial meeting place. "Rooms" were built without access and fire pits, rubbish heaps, and all the other signs of human habitation are few and far between.

Connecting it to other ceremonial sites seems like finding another piece to the puzzle.

Chaco Canyon was occupied, but the big multiblock structures like Pueblo Bonito and Chetro Ketl are as you described. Think of them like convention centers!