The remains of Anasaki culture have been found in Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, but the most important place may be Chaco Canyon in northwest New Mexico, which is 15 miles long and 1 mile wide. People living in this canyon suddenly showed unprecedented creativity around AD 1050, and created a special building-"big house". This great leap forward, called "Chaco phenomenon" by archaeologists, has created 12 elegant towns after decades of development, and gradually became the religious, political and commercial center of Anasaki. If we count the scattered settlements in the periphery, the population of the whole canyon is estimated to be more than 5000. For a tribe in that era, such a population figure is extremely huge. The multi-storey building called "big house" where they live is so magnificent that only the high-rise buildings that appear in big cities hundreds of years later can compare with it.
In that era of vast land and free choice, why should we concentrate our settlements in a tiny place? This is a mystery.
Each "big house" consists of hundreds of thousands of flat stones and more than 20 thousand pieces of pine or spruce sandalwood. All these materials were shipped from 35 miles away. The masonry technology displayed in the building is also unique. Each stone is chiseled with edges and corners, and the stone is reinforced with a thin layer of fine mud with tiny stone chips on it. The aesthetic significance is that all buildings are integrated with the natural scenery.
The most spectacular of the "big house" is a D-shaped five-story building, which contains about 800 rooms and covers an area of 3 acres.
There is also a round room in the "big house", which occupies a prominent position in the life of Anasaki people. Some people think that it is a place where sacrifices are held, while others think that it is a place where men who only play the role of accommodation and provider in their wives' rooms get together and have fun. Each room has a honeycomb roof made of wood, the top is filled with clods and gravel, and the only entrance is the gap at the top of the room; There is a cave on the indoor floor for the "spirit of the underworld" to go in and out. Fresh air enters the room along a stone pipe. The largest room has a diameter of 63 feet and a depth of 15 feet. The indoor sound effect is excellent, whispering from one end, and the sound can be transmitted to the other end; A sneeze can cause thunderous noise.
Every family has a big house. The living room is plastered with quite white plaster and painted with various murals. Windows and doors are opened very small to reduce the speed of heat dissipation in winter. There was a fire in the room to keep warm, but there was no chimney, so there was a thick layer of smoke and black on the roof of each house.
Why did Anasaki people choose such a desolate, barren and drought-prone canyon as their residence? This is another mystery.
Many pottery excavated from the "big house" are made into animals with contrasting black and white geometric patterns. Anasaki people can transform turquoise and shells into exquisite ornaments and weave wild mustard into beautiful baskets. They not only play music with drums, clappers, wooden whistles and flutes made of black bones, but also draw pictures on cliffs.
The Anasaki people in Chaco take their own settlement as the center and open up radial roads around them to maintain their position as a trade center.
The "Big House" also left an unsolved mystery for future generations: Anasaki blocked all the doors and windows facing the outside of the "Big House" with walls, and blocked the main entrance of the collective house with stones, leaving only a ladder to facilitate their access. This seems to be to guard against intruders, but no broken bones or any remnants of war were found in the ruins. /kloc-In the middle of the 0/2nd century, the Chaco culture in its heyday suddenly and mysteriously declined, and the residents in the canyon gave up their beautiful "big house" and moved to other places. What caused the Anasaki people to leave the basin where they lived for hundreds of years and their beloved "big house"?