From Caves to Cosmos

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: It is another world thriving with a hundred million people, connected by elaborate roads, bridges, and social networks spanning continents... (puffs) with some of the world's largest cities aligned to the heavens.

♪ ♪ It is the birthplace of some of the greatest civilizations on earth.

(conch horn trumpets) This is the Americas, more than 500 years ago.

Native Americans create America's first democracy that later inspires the United States Constitution... (man chanting) ...shape Mississippi swampland into the largest pyramids on the planet.

Carve Andean mountain slopes into fields that feed millions.

They domesticate plants that provide 60% of the food consumed in the world today.

Native Americans invent a way of life intimately connected to earth, sky, water, and all living things.

JIM ENOTE: Being in the Grand Canyon to me is like a womb.

CHRISTOPHER DAVIS: What this art represents is very sophisticated thinking.

♪ ♪ LEIGH KUWANWISIWMA: These ancient people were keen observers of everything.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: At the intersection of modern scholarship and Native knowledge is a new vision of America, and the people who built it.

♪ ♪ This is "Native America."

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: In a remote canyon in New Mexico, more than a thousand years ago, Native Americans build one of the largest cities in North America, Chaco.

♪ ♪ Today, all that remains are crumbling stone structures, long abandoned and largely forgotten.

♪ ♪ But some Native Americans maintain a strong connection to Chaco.

KUWANWISIWMA: We make pilgrimages to Chaco because it's a way of connecting back to our ancestral places.

NARRATOR: Leigh Kuwanwisiwma is a Hopi keeper of knowledge.

(speaking Hopi) The Hopi are one of the Pueblo communities, the most ancient peoples living in the Southwest.

Leigh is taking tribal members to a sacred cave shrine above the ruins of Chaco.

It's a once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage for many of these elders.

(Leigh speaking Hopi) The Hopi have never shared this private ceremony outside their community.

They offer cornmeal and eagle feathers in gratitude.

KUWANWISIWMA: Today is a very important day for all of us to be here among our own ancestral people.

RONALD WADSWORTH: Chaco is a very significant place.

A lot of people with high spiritual power and knowledge settled there.

It was a place where a lot of great teachings happened.

NARRATOR: Through the eyes of the Hopi and other Native peoples, this city is still alive.

♪ ♪ These ruins are ancient skyscrapers, filled with hundreds of rooms... ♪ ♪ Their walls carefully aligned to the sun and stars.

(birds chirping) They transform the surrounding desert into gardens and fields of corn.

(thunder rumbles) The Hopi believe Chaco was a place where thousands of people came to learn about earth's natural forces.

They share secret knowledge, prayers and practices about how to influence the elements-- wind, clouds, and rain.

Here, a thousand years ago, in the desert of the American Southwest was a thriving center of science and spirituality.

♪ ♪ Chaco was a place where clans came together to share their knowledge, to share the wisdom of being caretakers of the earth.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Now, an archaeological discovery is showing the extent of Chaco's influence, and just how far people would travel to come here.

Archaeologist Patti Crown led the investigation.

PATRICIA CROWN: This is room 28, a small room, but one that has been critical in our understanding of Chaco.

NARRATOR: First excavated in 1896, Room 28 contained dozens of cylindrical pots.

CROWN: They really seemed to be drinking vessels, I just wasn't sure what they might have been drinking in them.

NARRATOR: Patti took a closer look using forensic technology, and what she found was a complete surprise... Chocolate.

Chocolate comes from the cacao bean, and cacao only grows on trees in the tropics of Central America, more than 500 miles away.

Here, chocolate was considered food for the gods, used in ceremonies where it was poured between vessels, shaped like those found in Chaco.

CROWN: The cylinder jars are actually created in sets, and so one might be placed on the ground and the other used to pour from a height, creating this cascading waterfall of chocolate with bubbles at the bottom.

(chocolate splashing) NARRATOR: Chocolate and its sacred drinking ritual must have travelled from Central America to Chaco.

And chocolate is just one of many sacred objects discovered here.

Carved shells from the Pacific Ocean and Gulf of Mexico.

Precious metals and minerals, like turquoise from far-off mountains.

Colorful tropical birds from Central American jungles over a thousand miles away.

(birds calling) All objects of ritual significance brought from great distances.

CROWN: It made Chaco part of this very, very deep and distant belief system.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Remains of an ancient city.

Hopi traditions about a center of great knowledge.

Sacred artifacts connecting Chaco to distant cultures.

♪ ♪ A new picture is emerging of this remote ruin.

♪ ♪ In a world of cities teeming with people, immersed in the science and spirituality of earth and sky... Chaco is a metropolis of ideas and beliefs that span two continents.

(puffs) ♪ ♪ Where did these ideas come from?

(waves lapping) The story begins far from Chaco.

Archaeologists Anna Roosevelt and Chris Davis are searching for the earliest evidence of people in the Americas in the Amazon rainforest of western Brazil.

Their destination is a cave on this mountaintop rising out of the jungle.

This is the Caverna da Pedra Pintada, Portuguese for the "Cave of the Painted Rock."

DAVIS: That's amazing.

There's art going from the base all the way up to the ceiling.

NARRATOR: The cave is covered with paintings inspired by animals and the sky.

In this case there's a round object in the middle of the depiction of the turtle.

DAVIS: Yeah, a lot of them are very abstract.

ROOSEVELT: The local people, speculated that these were suns or moons-- And that might match with the turtle, because also turtle myths were related to the sun as well as a creation spirit.

NARRATOR: This cave in the Amazon is rewriting the history of when and how people settled the Americas, and who those people are.

♪ ♪ For decades, textbooks presented only one view-- around 11,000 B.C., during the Ice Age, big game hunters cross a frozen land bridge from Asia into Alaska, a region known as Beringia.

After the ice melts, they migrate down into the virgin territory of North and South America, (animals growling) hunting mammoths, giant sloths, and caribou, with finely fashioned stone spear points.

(birds squawking) The standard view is that people reached the Amazon about a thousand years ago.

But what Anna excavated in the Cave of the Painted Rock changes everything.

ROOSEVELT: The remains we found and dated in the cave show that people were living deep in the Amazon forest at 13,000 years ago.

This is some of the earliest art in the world and it's definitely, so far, the earliest art in the hemisphere.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Thousands of years before the Romans or Greeks, 8,000 years before the Egyptians, at least 13,000 years ago, people arrive in the Amazon.

♪ ♪ And their stone tools and paintings reveal these first Americans are not only mammoth hunters, they are foragers, fishermen, artists, and perhaps scientists.

(birds chirping) Chris is a specialist in archaeoastronomy, the study of how ancient peoples looked at the sky.

(birds chirping) DAVIS: Something is going on here that they were observing, and probably tracking, and tallying with this grid.

Because this is an open-air site, maybe they were counting something in the sky, and this big grid represents something of a calendar.

NARRATOR: To Chris and Anna, these images are calculated observations of the sky and nature.

DAVIS: What this art represents is very sophisticated thinking.

ROOSEVELT: This art links people with their environment through its animals, its plants, and the heavenly bodies of the sky.

NARRATOR: These paintings are the earliest art ever found in the Americas.

They suggest that people 13,000 years ago had already developed ideas and beliefs about the world that centered on the sky, caves, and nature.

But what exactly are these First American artists trying to say?

Part of the answer may lie a continent away in an ancient ceremony performed by the Hopi back at Chaco.

(indistinct chatter) KUWANWISIWMA: The reason we do these pilgrimages is to continue our connection to places like Yupköyvi, which is the Hopi name for Chaco.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Built in northwest New Mexico between 900 and 1150, Chaco grows to cover an area roughly the size of modern San Francisco.

♪ ♪ At its core are 12 Great Houses.

♪ ♪ Five stories high, and up to 800 rooms, these are the biggest buildings in what will be the United States until the 1800s.

♪ ♪ Throughout the city they also construct cave-like gathering places.

They were once covered, but their roofs have collapsed with time.

They are called kivas.

Back home in Arizona, the Hopi still use them today.

The kivas are very special settings where both men and women conduct different ceremonies.

So, a kiva that is a thousand years old is a very special setting for us.

NARRATOR: Prayers and rituals inside center on rainmaking, healing, and hunting, all to ensure the continuation of life.

♪ ♪ (chatter in Hopi) Today, the Hopi are conducting a smoking ceremony.

(chatter in Hopi) It has been passed down for thousands of years.

(speaking Hopi) (lighter clicks) (puffing) WADSWORTH: Smoking is a form of prayer.

We meditate.

We silently pray as we smoke.

We pray for rain.

We pray for long life, good health, abundance.

KUWANWISIWMA: The prayers are to the environment.

You take time to contemplate the power around us-- (wings fluttering) the bird world, the reptilian world, the animal world, the insect world.

They are part of who we are as Hopi people.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: For the Hopi and other Pueblo peoples, corn is their lifeblood.

And cornmeal is a sacred offering to Mother Earth.

As the smoke carries prayers to the winds, Leigh sprinkles the meal for birds and insects to spread to all four corners of the earth.

(bird wings flapping) It is a ritual that connects the Hopi to their origin story.

(chanting in Native language) WOMAN (speaking Hopi): (chanting in Native language) (chanting in Native language) WOMAN (speaking Hopi): ♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Many Native American peoples share a belief that they emerged from the earth.

Hopi and Pueblo tradition say that place of emergence is beneath America's best-known natural wonder-- the Grand Canyon.

Five million people visit each year.

They come to connect with its natural beauty.

But Pueblo people have an even deeper connection.

This is their birthplace.

ENOTE: When we come to a place of water, we take the water, we put it on our head, and we splash that water, we lift it and throw it into the air in the direction of Zuni, to encourage rain, four times, and then we drink the water.

NARRATOR: Jim Enote is an elder of the Ashiwi, a Pueblo group in what is now New Mexico, known as the Zuni.

Jim is mapping ancient images of the Zuni's origins, carved in stone by his ancestors.

FRANCESCA BOB: Just one hefty push.

There we go.

Thank you, Jim.

NARRATOR: He is joined by river guide Francesca Bob, who is part Zuni, and Zuni story keeper Octavius Seowtewa.

There's some panels up here on both sides.

♪ ♪ (indistinct chatter) NARRATOR: Maps show this place separate from the Grand Canyon, and call it Glen Canyon.

The Zuni just have one name for the whole area.

SEOWTEWA: We call it Kuhmin A'lakkwenne.

In Zuni that means the place of emergence, the place where the Zuni people came from.

(birds squawking) BOB: We're coming up to shore.

(speaking Native language) SEOWTEWA: A lot of people call it rock art, but for us it's history.

Wow.

SEOWTEWA: It's a memory of our people being here.

It's not just a story, but actually an experience...

Right.

Yeah.

It's like a diary.

NARRATOR: The petroglyph, more than a thousand years old, depicts a row of descending bighorn sheep.

It is an ancient lesson: to find water, follow the animals.

SEOWTEWA: You follow their tracks, you will eventually find a way down to the river.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: The Zuni want to both preserve and share these sacred symbols.

So Jim began hiring native painters to turn Zuni history into illustrated maps.

We looked at these kinds of petroglyphs and other kinds of images on ceramics.

Things that were woven in tapestries.

We thought about the songs and prayers we have, and we decided that we can make our own kinds of maps.

NARRATOR: Their maps are unlike any others.

Not limited by lines or topography, they depict cultural landscapes and living memories.

ENOTE: The Zuni maps represent the world without defined boundaries.

Many people are familiar with geometric maps with streets and roads.

And then when they see Zuni hand-painted maps, they realize there is a different way of looking at the world.

NARRATOR: This different way of looking at the world is shared across Native America.

It is a reverence for place-- Sacred caves, underground sanctuaries, grand canyons, real physical connections to earth.

It's why many call it Mother Earth.

♪ ♪ ENOTE: Being in the Grand Canyon to me is like a womb.

♪ ♪ This is the place we came from.

So the river is like an umbilical cord.

It's all part of the Mother, and Mother is the place where we begin.

It's our ultimate reference point.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Pueblo tradition requires them to honor Mother by taking care of her.

WOMAN (speaking Hopi): ♪ ♪ (knocking sound) WOMAN (speaking Hopi): ♪ ♪ WOMAN (speaking Hopi): ♪ ♪ NARRATOR: In their origin story, after they emerge from the earth, the Pueblo are given a sacred quest-- find the Center Place.

KUWANWISIWMA: So, some clans went clockwise and some clans went counterclockwise.

And as the clans migrated, they placed an insignia of where they were at that particular time and place, which is a spiral.

It's about the people moving from one place to another, living in some place, testing it, moving on and on until they finally find the right place.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Finding the right place-- the Center Place-- lies at the heart of Pueblo belief.

It is more than a physical location.

It is about living in balance with the natural world.

This search for the center place is built right into the kivas.

Every kiva is aligned to the four compass directions: north, south, east, and west.

That's true north, and this one is true south.

So the sun rises here in the east, and then sets to the west there.

NARRATOR: There are two more sacred directions: up and down.

(fire crackling) Climbing a ladder out of a kiva is symbolic of emerging into this world.

The Hopi believe the six directions give kivas great power.

♪ ♪ The sacred power of six directions is shared by many peoples across Native America.

One of its purest expressions was recently discovered in a man-made cave near Mexico City.

Here, almost 2,000 years ago, is the largest city in the Americas, Teotihuacan, population 125,000.

The name of its builders is lost to history, but it would take more than 1,500 years for a U.S. city, New York, to surpass its population.

Its biggest pyramid is one of the largest in the world, after Egypt's Great Pyramids of Giza.

Yet archaeologist Sergio Gomez is more interested in what lies underground, a previously unknown man-made cave.

(Sergio speaking Spanish) SERGIO GOMEZ (translated): In almost every Mesoamerican culture, caves have a deep significance in cosmological thought.

That is why this discovery is so important.

NARRATOR: In 2003, a monsoon rainstorm created a sinkhole near a pyramid known as the Temple of the Feathered Serpent.

(Sergio speaking Spanish) (translated): The entrance to the tunnel is located under the white tent, at a depth of 14 meters.

NARRATOR: Sergio was the first to rappel down the sinkhole.

(machine whirring) It led to a tunnel, carved 2,000 years ago.

Inside, he found artifacts brought here from vast distances, just like at Chaco.

(speaking Spanish) (speaking Spanish) (translated): This is one of the thousands of pieces, of artifacts that we have discovered in the interior of the tunnel.

It's a representation of the principal deity of both the underworld and the celestial region.

NARRATOR: Sergio believes many of the offerings symbolize heaven and earth, and are carefully positioned in the tunnel.

(speaking Spanish) (translated): We believe that the placement of each object throughout the tunnel had a particular meaning.

They were not just placed there randomly.

NARRATOR: The tunnel ends in a human-made cave.

Its floor is sculpted to represent the underworld.

Its ceiling is covered in artificial starlight, mimicking the cosmos.

♪ ♪ (Sergio speaking Spanish) GOMEZ (translated): The entire tunnel was originally covered in a dust of shiny metallic mineral.

They covered the walls and ceiling of the tunnel so it's as if you were seeing the sky and the stars twinkling.

NARRATOR: In this cosmic sanctuary of stars, Sergio finds two stone figures, statues that depict the first man and woman in the city's origin story.

Sergio laser scans the tunnel.

It descends 50 feet underground, extends for 340 feet, and ends directly beneath the Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent.

Here, the Teotihuacanos place the founding couple, within 16 inches of the exact center of the pyramid.

(Sergio speaking Spanish) (translated): We are positioned exactly under the intersection of the north-south axis and east-west axis.

And above us is the peak, the central point of the Temple of the Feathered Serpent.

Right in this spot.

They believed there was a conduit that connected this region from the underworld to the celestial region.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: The builders went to extreme lengths using precise math and masterful engineering to align their sanctuary of stars to the six directions.

Just like the kiva builders at Chaco, the early Mesoamericans share a belief that the six directions represent finding balance in the universe.

It is a quest to find the center between the world below and the one above, between caves and the cosmos.

(Sergio speaking Spanish) GOMEZ (translated): In the southwestern United States, including Central America and South America, there are a series of ideas that form a general concept of the cosmos.

I've heard and read of the ideas the Hopi have about the cosmos and how the universe was created.

These ideas are shared throughout many indigenous communities, including indigenous communities in Mexico today.

NARRATOR: Teotihuacan is part of something bigger going on across the Americas.

The Maya, Aztec, and Inca, all build monumental cities aligned to compass directions and with an eye to the worlds above and below.

♪ ♪ And at Chaco, the builders extend the science of six directions to apply not only to place, but also to time.

WADSWORTH: Alignment was very important to these people at Chaco.

It helped them to determine the times of year, the cycles of their crops, when they plant certain seeds.

And it also determines the months, the moons when the certain ceremonies happen.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: At the very center of Chaco, builders create a sacred space to unify time and place-- Pueblo Bonito.

(echoing chants) It is the largest of the city's 12 great houses, with over 800 rooms and 30 ceremonial kivas.

We can talk about this as a building, we can talk about it as a storage unit and a ceremonial center.

And we can also talk about it as a clock.

NARRATOR: Park Ranger GB Cornucopia came to Chaco to study the stars 30 years ago and never left.

♪ ♪ To GB, Pueblo Bonito and the sky are intricately linked.

The great house is aligned to the six directions.

One wall runs east-west.

And another north-south.

Each day, as the sun gets higher in the sky, its shadow creeps closer to the north wall.

Here we can see the shadow is almost gone.

And in just a few moments it will disappear.

♪ ♪ There...

This is solar noon, when the sun is at it's highest point in the sky.

NARRATOR: Pueblo Bonito is a clock that tracks the sun during the day.

It's also a calendar that tracks it during the year.

Every day, the sun sets in a different place on the horizon.

The solar year starts on the winter solstice, when it sets in the south.

On the summer solstice, it sets in the north.

The two days halfway in between them are called equinoxes.

And today, on the fall equinox, the sun lines up with the east-west wall.

CORNUCOPIA: We're between the two extremes when it's really hot in the summer, summer solstice, and when it's really cold in the winter, winter solstice.

We're at that midway point.

♪ ♪ The north wall tracks the day.

The west wall tracks the year.

Built to the six directions, Pueblo Bonito unites place and time.

♪ ♪ CORNUCOPIA: People tell time by their relationship with the sky.

Now most of us have forgotten that, because we have devices that represent time, we've got watches and calendars and clocks.

But if you've got good markers on your horizon, you can predict the seasons, so that you can prepare for ceremonies, agriculture, all manner of things.

NARRATOR: The people of Chaco look to the sky to guide their agriculture and their ceremonies.

Their city is the physical embodiment of their worldview.

It is a way of living that is both a scientific understanding of the cycles of the earth, sun, and stars, and a spiritual quest to find their place within it.

♪ ♪ WOMAN (speaking Hopi): WOMAN (speaking Hopi): ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Sky watching, the six directions, and a search for people's place in the world.

These ideas are found throughout the Americas.

They are part of a foundational belief system shared between distant and diverse cultures.

Where does this common belief come from?

The Chumash may have an answer.

Their ancestors were the first coastal settlers of what is now Southern California.

My ancestors were far better paddlers, far better navigators, far better fishermen, far better craftsmen than I will ever be.

(singing in Chumash) NARRATOR: Today, these Chumash men are taking to the water in a flat-bottomed canoe, like that of their ancestors.

(singing continues) REGINALD PAGALING: Water is life.

It's such a great teacher of respect.

It's a great teacher of power.

It's a great teacher of... calmness.

NARRATOR: Long ago, water taught the Chumash a lesson they still practice-- (crickets chirping) the best time to paddle is at night.

SALAZAR: That's when the ocean is the calmest.

(water lapping) It's so dark that you can barely see the paddler in front of you.

You feel your paddle hit the water and come out.

It's powerful.

NARRATOR: Far at sea, in the dark of night, the Chumash look to the stars to guide them.

Just as their ancestors did.

PAGALING: At a very early stage we saw the Milky Way as a way to chart our way across the islands.

♪ ♪ My ancestors were masters at building canoes that could travel great distances.

NARRATOR: Their mastery of the stars and seafaring enabled the very first Americans to move quickly down the coast and across the continents.

Can the way America is settled explain why Native Americans share so many core beliefs?

♪ ♪ New DNA evidence suggests that all Native Americans are descended from one people.

They live together for 25,000 years, stuck behind a wall of ice in an area called Beringia.

Perhaps here, over thousands of years, people observe cycles of the earth, sun, and stars, and plant the seeds for a worldview that will be shared across the Americas.

♪ ♪ Can these ideas really have been developed so far back in time?

If so, they may be expressed in the earliest art found here.

It dates back 13,000 years to the very beginnings of Native America.

Anna Roosevelt and Chris Davis re-examine the rock paintings in Brazil's Amazon rainforest.

ROOSEVELT: It's been assumed that hunting and gathering people were primitive and wouldn't be into art very much.

But everywhere you go in this rocky area, you find a painting.

NARRATOR: Chris believes the paintings may relate to the sky.

DAVIS: All of the rock art is facing the west.

So maybe there was something important in the west, maybe sunsets.

NARRATOR: The cliff wall extends a half mile.

It is covered in paintings of animals, grids, and circles all the way to its far south end.

DAVIS: This is the southernmost image of the painting sequence.

And there's two concentric circles-- one above, and another one below.

NARRATOR: Chris thinks these circles could depict stages of the sun setting.

And their location here to the far south even suggests a specific day: the day when the sun is at its farthest southern point, winter solstice-- the shortest day of the year.

DAVIS: And as it angles downward, it starts to rest on a pedestal.

NARRATOR: Chris suspects that pedestal represents a rocky outcrop on the horizon.

He has come here on the winter solstice to see if the sun will line up with the platform.

If there's a match, we should see it today.

(birds chirping) ♪ ♪ NARRATOR: The winter solstice sun sets behind the rocky platform, just as depicted on the southern cliff face.

What's more, art on the northern end of the cliff marks the summer solstice.

DAVIS: At the northern end we have a match with the summer solstice.

In between, there are images of animals, perhaps constellations, and other important resources.

They are recognizing connections, associations, that when the sun is at this particular point in the sky, these animals are most active, or these changes occur in the environment.

NARRATOR: 8,000 years before England's celebrated Stonehenge, Native Americans paint a cliff face to transform a mountain into a three-dimensional solar calendar.

It is the earliest evidence of tracking astronomical events in the Americas.

DAVIS: They created a calendar that you can walk through, a pictographic almanac that encapsulates this landscape.

NARRATOR: The calendar expresses an intimate knowledge of their new world.

Caves and mountains provide shelter, plants and animals teach them lessons of survival, and the sky helps them find their place in the world.

These same foundational ideas, shared across two continents, are already established at the very beginning of Native America.

DAVIS: They were not just living off of the land, they were actually trying to figure out how to better place themselves in the landscape.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: The Pueblo people seek the same thing: to find their place in the world.

They discover it in America's Southwest.

WADSWORTH: The migration stopped here in this American Southwest.

We came here to the center, and this is where we all conduct our ceremonies, and to bless the world like Maasaw instructed us to do.

NARRATOR: The Hopi fulfill the covenant they made when they entered this world: they find the center place.

♪ ♪ Along the way, they create Chaco, balanced between the underworld and the heavens, six directions aligned to the cosmos.

Chaco becomes a beacon, drawing people from thousands of miles away.

Visitors bring hallowed objects like turquoise stones, tropical bird feathers, sea shells, and chocolate.

Both cacao and scarlet macaws are tropical species that were brought from a great distance into Pueblo Bonito.

♪ ♪ There's no question that there was this very large area of shared beliefs in ritual activities.

(chanting, drumming) (scraping) (chanting, drumming continue) NARRATOR: Chaco was a place where people came together from vast distances.

KUWANWISIWMA: Chaco was a culmination of many years of learning and knowledge, and perfecting their ceremonies.

NARRATOR: People share knowledge and beliefs based on thousands of years of observing their world.

Ceremonies to influence the very forces of nature.

They are still practiced today.

In the ancient kiva at Chaco, the Hopi elders conduct their smoking ceremony to make rain.

(puffing) KUWANWISIWMA: You offer your own private prayer, and you speak to the spirits of our ancestors.

(wings fluttering) You offer these prayers in hopes they in turn bless us with rain.

The smoke comes out from the pipe, emerge to that cloud, make a big cloud, and then rain comes from that.

The Hopi prayers for rain are answered.

(rainfall pattering) ♪ ♪ Just like Hopi tradition says, Chaco was a special place to study the forces of nature.

It grows out of a deep connection with the earth, planted in time immemorial, developed over tens of thousands of years, and shared across two continents by the pioneering people who create this world.

They are Native Americans.

Their teachings remain as relevant today as ever.

♪ ♪ WADSWORTH: We were taught to live in balance with nature.

Each individual has tremendous power to change his world.

We are a microcosm of the universe itself, so how we behave, how we take care of ourselves, reflects in the earth.

ENOTE: The world lives with us.

We live with it.

But we have to maintain it.

We have to take care of it in order for it to provide for us.

(birds chirping) SALAZAR: To me it's essential to my survival that I am part of the earth, I am part of the family of plants and animals and bugs and birds and all the mammals.

I'm just a part.

ENOTE: Deep inside the teachings of Chaco Canyon resonate and still continue today.

♪ ♪