Chacoan corner doorway in Pueblo Bonito. Created circa AD 1050

Chaco Culture National Historical Park is a United States National Historical Park and World Heritage Site located in New Mexico.

It preserves one of America's most significant and fascinating cultural and historic areas. Between AD 850 and 1250, Chaco Canyon was a major center of ancestral Puebloan culture. It was a hub of ceremony, trade, and administration for the prehistoric Four Corners area _ unlike anything before or since.

Chaco is remarkable for its monumental public and ceremonial buildings, and its distinctive architecture. To construct the buildings, along with the associated Chacoan roads, ramps, dams, and mounds, required a great deal of well organized and skillful planning, designing, resource gathering, and construction. The Chacoan people combined pre_planned architectural designs, astronomical alignments, geometry, landscaping, and engineering to create an ancient urban center of spectacular public architecture _ one that still amazes and inspires us a thousand years later.

The Chacoan cultural sites are fragile and irreplaceable and represent a significant part of America's cultural heritage. At least one of the sites in the park, Fajada Butte, has been closed to the public due to fears of erosion caused by tourists. The sites are part of the sacred homeland of Pueblo Indian peoples of New Mexico, the Hopi Indians of Arizona, and the Navajo Indians of the Southwest, all of whom continue to respect and honor them.