(wind howling) (spare music) - [Narrator] In the American Southwest, with Mexico and Central America to the South, a vast desert reaches as far as the mind can imagine.

Its beauty alluring and magnetic, and yet foreboding in its sparseness.

At its heart lies Chaco Canyon.

1000 years ago, a people, undaunted by the canyon's barren landscape, constructed monumental buildings for rituals attending to the sun and to the moon.

A ceremonial center of magnificent architecture not seen before or after in the history of North America, created by a civilization that constructed more than 150 related structures set in rugged and challenging landscapes.

Built across an expanse of 70,000 square miles, without beasts of burden, using tools made only of wood and stone.

(gentle music) In this land of little water, a dagger of light crosses an ancient spiral.

A puzzling engraving marks the rock wall in a canyon worn by weather and a long-vanished ocean.

Nearly invisible roads, up to 35 miles in length, spread across the landscape.

Stone buildings align with the sun and the moon, but the people who created these structures remain a mystery.

Their history shrouded behind a veil that left no written language and few representations of themselves.

- [Phillip] In Chaco, we don't know much about 'em, in some ways.

We don't know what language they spoke.

We don't know what their religion was, and we have no idea how their thinking went, unless you look at the astronomy.

- [Narrator] For more than 300 years, generation upon generation, the astronomers of Chaco tracked and understood the movements of the sun and the moon.

(gentle music) The legacy of Chaco offers a unique window into the past, a place where time and space merge, the world of the Chaco civilization.

(gentle music continues) (airplane rumbling) For more than 40 years, since her rediscovery of the Sun Dagger, Anna Sofaer, seen here with Pilot Adriel Heisey, (Anna speaking faintly) has conducted independent research into the Chaco world, a lifelong endeavor that includes a series of published research papers and public presentations.

Why a people chose to establish their monumental center in a land with so little rainfall and so few natural resources remains another mystery.

- [Anna] Adriel's helped me to see a huge expanse of Chaco.

He'll fly out from the center 120 miles south or west or north, and he'll find sites that look like parts of the central buildings.

And it's endless.

- [Adriel] One thing I like to think about is the Ice Ages.

If you imagine how much more moisture there would've been in the atmosphere, especially when it began to warm up, there would've been torrents of water that we can't even imagine.

- [Anna] So that really shaped the land.

- [Adriel] I think so - [Narrator] More than 1000 years ago, when Chaco began, where did the Chaco people come from?

And 300 years later, when they left the canyon, where did they go and why?

- Perhaps the most enduring question about Chaco is what was it specifically that drew people from this vast region into some sort of coherent cultural expression, expression of architecture, expression of ceramic designs, a sort of ritual complex.

How do so many people get integrated into one system?

- [Alonso] What is unique about people throughout the world is their relationship to the place that they chose to inhabit.

And this is what I find so beautiful about a place like Chaco Canyon.

(wind howling) There's a need to align oneself with the forces of nature, with the environment, (strong wind) in order to manifest that cyclical beauty that exists in the sky and its relationship to human activity.

There's more to it than creating a political structure or a governing body over people.

This is an effort to master nature.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] An effort that would extend across a region known as the Four Corners, where the four American states of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico meet, and with more than 150 outlying structures, create one of the largest ancient civilizations in North America.

Our first steps into the world of the Chaco people with Anna Sofaer, begins here, the largest building in Chaco Canyon, in archeaological terms, a Great House called Pueblo Bonito.

With fellow researcher, Richard Friedman, Anna is about to enter a world where change was a constant companion.

This would be the original entrance - To this massive building.

An opening that's what?

About two and a half feet wide?

- Right.

- Or two feet wide?

- And you can see where on the edges here where we've got this, this masonry isn't locked in.

- Yeah.

- That shows that at some time this entrance is wider, then it got narrower as they built this secondary wall.

- Oh yeah.

This would've been so important right here, even though it looks empty now, Rich.

(footsteps crunching) (gentle music) - [Narrator] Bare earth today.

1,000 years ago, the site of a sacred structure known as a kiva.

- There used to be, at one time, a Great Kiva, the largest Great Kiva in Pueblo Bonito.

50 feet across, 20 foot from floor to ceiling, several hundred timbers, if not over 1,000 timbers to construct that roof.

- [Narrator] For reasons still unknown, the kiva that once existed here was carefully deconstructed and dismantled by the Chaco people, the site covered and concealed by a thick layer of packed earth.

- This is how wide it would be going to the center.

And then if I walk another 25 feet, I'm at the other edge, right?

- Correct.

- [Narrator] Kivas exist today throughout tribal communities in the Southwest, and in this reconstruction of a kiva 65 miles from Chaco Canyon.

- [Petuuche] Kivas retain this spiritual essence of our way of life.

And the kiva was really meant as a physical depiction of this entrance into the place of birth of our people, ascended from the Mother Earth, so that even all the so-called Chacoan areas of hundreds and maybe thousands of these places, those kivas are still important, still sacred to my people.

- [Narrator] A few steps away from the now bare earth of the West Plaza, sites within Pueblo Bonito and pottery from across the Chaco world offer clues about Chaco culture and perhaps the very shape and form of Pueblo Bonito itself.

A labyrinthian structure built over the course of 300 years, an immense building, 800 rooms rising four stories above the plaza.

One of the largest ancient constructions in the Americas that may have permanently housed no more than a few dozen full-time residents.

- Doesn't this quite closely take us to those smaller rooms where the burials were from the very beginning of the building?

- Yes.

This north-south axis takes us to the center of that original wedge that Pueblo Bonito was created from.

Everything is pretty much in here.

- [Narrator] Near the burial chambers, valued objects pointed to the presence of an elite, perhaps the only full-time residents of Bonito.

A full picture has been concealed by the removal of artifacts from Chaco and their scattering to institutions, and even into private hands.

Through the accessible artifacts, we are able to catch important glimpses of the Chaco world.

(uplifting music) - [Anna] The burials in Bonito all come from one woman.

It's called a matrilinear lineage, and that's because everybody there, who's buried in the building that we know of, came from that one woman from very early in the 800s.

You had to be of royal blood (gentle guitar) - [Narrator] At a related Chaco burial site, Richard and Anna learned more details about the possibility of a distinct separate elite.

- [Richard] One of them was covered from throat to ankle with beads, approximately 40,000 beads.

Some of the beads were so small they had to use a magnifying glass to decide which was bead and which was dirt.

- [Anna] What extraordinary work.

- [Richard] Really high-status burial.

- [Anna] So like the work that they did in Chaco Canyon, thousands and thousands of tiny turquoise beads strung in necklaces for very special people.

- [Narrator] Along with the beauty, a word of caution regarding interpretation.

- [Anna] So Rich, the burials in Bonito show some sign of violence.

It's a lot to try to understand.

What was happening?

Why were people, why did their bones show signs of abuse and violence and disturbance to the bodies?

- It's hard to say exactly why.

In some cases, (gentle music) people are disarticulated.

(quiet music) And that story continues here.

You see a lot of incomplete skeletons, some disarticulated skeletons.

I find it interesting to look at, but I try not to assign any values to it, other than you know it's happening, and it's something that a lot of people don't want to talk about, but it's going on.

And again, depending on the cultural views, it may have been a very positive thing that these things were happening.

Objects associated with burials are there to help that person on their journey to wherever they're going after this life.

That may be what we're seeing with Chaco as well.

This is the oldest area of Bonito.

This is the portion of the building that was used for hundreds of years.

There was a real reason for this building, - [Anna] Which meant that generations of people were being buried there.

- [Richard] The same descendants from that same mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, great-great-grandmother.

- [Narrator] More astonishing evidence confirms the identity of the permanent residents of Bonito, A distinct, perhaps dominant elite.

This is one of the few three-dimensional depictions of a human figure from among the Chaco artifacts.

And yet, take a closer look at the hands.

- [Anna] Characteristic of a dynasty or royalty.

A large proportion of their group had six fingers and six toes.

They married each other when they were related.

Brothers, sisters, cousins, and maybe royalty wanted that.

People think, in Egypt, they did that.

And so that was honored because it meant your blood was getting more purely royal.

And then on the back wall behind Bonito, if you go to the cliff, it's got six-toed feet going up the cliff.

- [Richard] And then we've got shell, a lot of shell, a conch shell and a mouthpiece for that conch shell to make it a trumpet.

(horn blows) And most of the shell would've come from the West Coast, the Sea of Cortez, some possibly from the Gulf of Mexico.

And in the case of the burial here, we've got macaws here, which macaws of course don't, they can't breed and grow in Chaco.

So they were traded or brought in, both Scarlet and Military macaws, as well as parrots.

So we have not only the macaws, but we've got the smaller parrots here as well.

- [Anna] I don't think we'll ever know exactly who was here from the south, but we do know they brought a number of Scarlet macaws.

(bird calling) Cacao, those things could only come from deep in the tropics.

Probably 2000 miles, could be more.

- [Richard] Quite a journey.

- [Narrator] The artifacts reveal a remarkable kinship between the cultures of north and south, in their cacao drinking vessels, separated by a distance of 2000 miles.

(gentle music) - [Petuuche] In our own oral stories about this hemispheric connection, pre-Columbian people coming from the south, from the ancient cultures of Central American to here.

We actually have biologic connection to some of the people in Central America.

How far it went beyond there, south, is unknown, but yet if you look at the philosophy of the Indigenous peoples in this spiritual communion, it's very similar between north and south, in this reverence for nature.

(gentle flute music) - [Phillip] 800 AD, 850 AD was a time of upheaval in Mesoamerica.

(ominous music) An elite part of the society, astronomers, philosophers, people who had high-status roles in that Mayan culture probably moved north.

- To me, the most important aspects of what could have been most compelling to people here are the exotic artifacts, the imports from Mesoamerica.

(birds calling) Being a farmer living in a pueblo, maybe you have some concepts of distant lands, but you don't know them.

(birds squawking) You know them only through myths and stories.

Cacao found in cylinder vases.

Cacao grows far away in the tropics.

You never would've tasted anything like that.

A very strange taste.

This new frothy chocolate beverage.

(small bell tinkling) Bells made of copper, full of sounds, tinkling of bells, sounds you've never heard before.

Metal was not known in the ancient Puebloan culture.

Yet copper bells are coming in, this strange, shiny substance.

The element of surprise is part of what gave Chaco's leaders power, guiding the construction of these buildings in certain orientations, understanding the movement of the sun and the moon, physically demonstrating to you their connections with a paradise.

Connecting your life with the movement of the cosmos (wind howling) In that way, it is something like a dream.

(gentle music continues) (footsteps crunching) - [Narrator] In a landscape carved by the wind, and the tides of an ocean that vanished millions of years before Chaco, (Anna speaking faintly) Anna and Richard locate more aspects of the dream.

Oh, here.

- Oh yeah.

[Richard] There we see shrimp burrows.

These that kind of look like a corn cob imprinted in the rock, that's a shrimp burrow.

And those are fossilized, so they're rock.

A few million years ago, this was beach deposits on the edge of sea.

- Look at this.

This is incredible.

These scallop shells.

We are in a landscape that was once underwater with sea creatures and shells.

(gentle music) - [Richard] At one time, we were thousands of feet under the surface here.

They no doubt knew what was represented here, that this was at some point associated with the ocean or with water.

(waves crashing) - [Paul] Before the world that we know was created, it was all water.

(waves crashing) Everything was water.

The water had to recede in order for land to show itself.

When the water receded, there were beings that created the land that maybe that we know Chaco, in some ways, maybe represents that beginning.

Everything in this life follows a cycle.

That was the way that things were created and things were meant to be.

Everything was a cycle.

You're born, and you live your life, and then it terminates, but it's not an ending.

It continues to move forward, and that forward progression never stops.

Like that conch shell, Chaco continues to build and never stops, (horn blows) continues to move forward, never ending.

You start in the center and you begin to move out.

- [Elena] In the Pueblo world, everything starts with the center place.

(wind howling) The center place is the village or the community, the plazas, the dance space, the ceremonial space, and then you move out in a spiral, not concentric circles, but you move out in a spiral, a symbol that exists in the natural world from seashells to hurricanes.

(gentle music) You move out to the mesas, you move out to the mountains, and it encompasses all of the Chacoan world.

(gentle music continues) - [Phillip] Someone gave us this, it's a conch shell.

They came here to the house and they blew it.

It's a beautiful sound.

But anyway, if you would slice this across-wise, you would see this replica of the spiral, which is also a logarithmic function.

If you take that kiva that was buried in the West Plaza and you use that as an anchor point, and then you expand around that, that makes a spiral, which is very close to what a spiral is in a nautilus, and it matches up very well with the architectural construct at Bonito.

That's a graphic illustration that is very, very strong.

But it kind of comes down to, did they do that knowing it was going to create a spiral?

Or did they do it for some other reason?

- The curve is hard to see from any one spot because it's such a broad and deep curve.

- Yeah, but I feel myself walking in a curve here.

- [Phillip] Well, I don't know what the other reason would've been, but I do know if you take something from nature that the creator made and you replicate it in your building,I think you've got something there.

(gentle music) - [Anna] The question is, did they intentionally with the placement of that Great Kiva, but also with the placement of the curve itself create a spiral?

And what would the spiral mean?

- [Alonso] The idea of a spiral as a portal is evocative of many images in ancient art, particularly the Maya, where we see Gods emerging out of shells, out of conch shells.

At the beginning is the underworld, establishment of the underworld, then the emergence into the sky, and then this cycling through the sky, and that basically establishes the conduit, the portal between the underworld and the sky.

A relationship between the northern traditions and the southern Mesoamerican traditions, this idea that emergence is the critical one.

Movement establishes space.

Once you establish space, you find your center.

- [Richard] If you look at the spiral as it emerges in the Great Kiva, out of either the underworld or a lower realm going up through Bonito, so it's moving through the current realm, then it goes into the sky, which would be the upper realm or into the cosmos.

By doing that, you are locking those realms together in that building.

You've got the underworld, the current, and the upper world all linked together by that building and by its architectural form, - [Anna] I think they were constructing almost a portal in Chaco that conveyed to people that if you come here, you go into a kiva and you, you are transformed, transcendent beyond death.

(gentle music continues) (birds calling) (gentle music) - [Narrator] Anna Sofaer's journey into the Chaco world began in the high heat of a Chaco Canyon Summer.

(footsteps crunching) (birds calling) Anna volunteered to survey rock art, petroglyphs, and was assigned to climb to Fajada Butte.

She had been an artist and photographer in New York City and had no idea that her life was about to change.

- [Anna] We got there near noon, close to the summer solstice, and there was the moment of this beautiful dagger of light through the center of the spiral.

The dagger, as we later learned, would last no more than 18 minutes, and only at that time of year.

In order to create the Sun Dagger site, you had to have that full identification with these cycles.

Cliff edge just carved out in the right way, create the slabs in just the right position so that you had the markings combined there for the sun and the moon.

- [Narrator] Over time, Anna's observations revealed more intricate alignments with the spiral.

At winter solstice, the shortest daylight hours of the year, two sun daggers mark the outer edges of the spiral.

- [Anna] And that research set the course of all my work in Chaco.

We began with a survey of Pueblo Bonito.

- [Robert Redford] The survey reveals that the two long straight walls are exactly north-south and east-west, directions that have a special connection with the sun.

(wind howling) As the morning sun arcs over the building, the shadow of the mid-wall recedes, until just at noon when it disappears.

(birds calling) (gentle music) The long east-west wall of Bonito also has a relationship to the sun, to its journey through the seasons.

(gentle music continues) The rising sun position shifts constantly through the year, but the sun rises exactly in line with this wall only on the two equinox days, mid-points between the extreme summer and winter at Chaco.

(gentle music continues) And only on these days, the sun sets along this wall.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] Another revelation.

Steps away from the Sun Dagger, Anna located another engraving in the rock.

- [Anna] I had a Hopi elder man speak to me many years ago and said that Petroglyph on Fajada Butte, that's shaped like a bow and arrow and shows Bonito's shape, even with a drill hole at that particular kiva, that that petroglyph's more important than the building itself.

Which was like a message for me 40 years ago to say, boy, it's time to consider these buildings, not residential, not utilitarian, but very important symbolic structures.

- [Phillip] The Bonito glyph, so much metaphor and symbolism that I still struggle to see in its entirety.

What you have is an arrow, like a bow and arrow type thing, and it's bisecting a shape, which looks like Bonito.

And then if you want to go further, it's pointing towards, what I believe, represents the path of the sun.

But right next to the arrow within the enclosures of what I think of Bonito is that hole, obviously, representing the underground.

And then you have the arrow pointing south in relationship to Bonito.

(mysterious music) South has its connotation, at least in Hopi, the flower world.

(water babbling) The idea of life after death.

You have dragonflies and butterflies and water.

It's a rich, beautiful area.

It's an ideal kind of world, that flower world, and that's where that arrow is pointing.

(water babbling) - [Narrator] A world filled with the promise of abundant water, a vision of paradise to those living in the arid land of Chaco.

- [Phillip] One of the underlying things that is true from Neolithic times to present times is the desire to bring order out of chaos.

Sometimes it rains too much.

Sometimes the wind blows too hard, sometimes it doesn't rain.

There's social unrest.

There's a lot of chaos here.

If you have the same kiva architecture here and 30 miles away, 90 miles away, you have the same kind of architecture.

What you have in the cosmos, you've brought order to chaos.

(gentle music) - [Alonso] Sacred geometries were created when the structures were built.

If you were able to build the way the Gods build, you would gain all of that energy, that power that the Gods put forth.

When the sun and the moon responded and acted on those structures, that divinity was made apparent.

(gentle music) - [Phillip] All of this is set up in balance, and you can begin to see how these things complement each other.

For example, you've got Bonito, which is oriented with the sun, but you go across the canyon there a little ways to Chetro Ketl, which is lunar.

The spiritual, the religious, the material world, the ordinary.

They're all in one comprehensive mix, and it's never separate.

- [Anna] So Pat, we're at this incredibly beautiful Great Kiva, and I think it represented the moon for the Chaco people.

It has 29 niches, and that seems like the lunar month, - The mathematicians, the engineers, they held the sacred knowledge, and it became sacred geometry.

Everything about Chaco is connected.

You're gonna observe the sun.

Obviously you're gonna observe the moon as well.

- [Narrator] Chetro Ketl encompasses the kiva dedicated to the moon and reaches toward the mesa with a long straight back wall, 500 feet in length.

So unlike the curved spiral back wall of Pueblo Bonito.

- What was this alignment?

- This is to the moon.

[Anna] It's right along here that the midwinter full moon will rise only once in its 18- to 19-year cycle.

(mysterious music) At the time the moon rises, there would be just a few people, very special people seeing the sight on Fajada when the shadow cuts right through the center of the spiral.

At the same time, there would be hundreds of people here in the moment of the moon on that alignment, and they were marking that with this immense wall.

- So Chetro Ketl is the moon and Pueblo Bonito is the sun.

- Exactly.

- Uh-huh.

(gentle music) - [Pat] The amazing extent of observation an alignment to the moon and how complex the moon is, how can you not put your hand on the wall?

(gentle music continues) - [Robert Redford] Today, very few people are aware of the moon's long, complex cycle.

There are the monthly phase changes, and like the sun, the rising and setting positions of the moon are constantly shifting on the horizon from north to south.

Only observers carefully tracking the moon over many years would experience its complete cycle.

The full moon occurring at midwinter rises and sets farthest north in the year, but if you track the same midwinter full moon over nine and a quarter years, it would rise and set farther and farther north.

And then it would travel south over nine and a quarter years to complete an 18 and a half year cycle.

It would take generations of people to track and mark this long cycle.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] To confirm the coordinated designs that tracked the moon's alignment across the Chaco world.

Anna approached pilot, Adriel Heisey.

(airplane soaring) - [Adriel] Anna wanted to capture that singular event of the full moon rising between the pinnacles at Chimney Rock when viewed from the Chacoan pueblo at the foot of the pinnacles, a moon rise that only happens once every 18 and a half years.

There was a sense of the ancientness of that process.

This kind of celestial waltz going on that I made myself part of.

- [Narrator] The Great House at Chimney Rock had been constructed on this extreme precipice in the 11th century over the course of 75 years, built in three stages, each stage corresponding to the appearance of the moon between the two pinnacles, a conjunction that occurs only once every 18 and a half years.

(bright music) The time span dated by analyzing tree rings in the Great House timbers, the Great House itself becoming a shrine to the moon.

- [Adriel] I had my airplane, I had my camera, I knew what I was doing, and I was there on December 15th when it happened.

Just enough light from the twilight sky, and there, there it was.

- [Anna] When I think of Fajada Butte getting the shadow of light on the spiral on the left edge just as way up at Chimney Rock, the moon rises between the two pillars of rock.

That's a bonding between those two sites.

But we're really talking about is a bonding amongst 150 or more outlying Chacoan communities, A powerful mind or minds bonded together.

The bonding through the Great House structure, and then the kiva, and then ceremony that's using the same kinds of cycles of the sun and the moon.

It's writing on the landscape.

(wind howling) - [Narrator] In Chaco Canyon, Anna rediscovered yet another spiral, a shadow dagger that appears twice a year on the equinox in the spring and fall, when the hours of daylight and nighttime, light and shadow, become equal.

- [Anna] Within sight of Fajada Butte, when the sun rises at equinox, you have a beautiful shadow bisecting another spiral.

(gentle music) That spiral's on the earth level, so of course it's a shadow.

Whereas we look up at the Butte, 500 feet off of the earth, we have a beautiful light dagger through a similar spiral on the summer solstice, the longest day of the year.

Another bonding, or another unity between the worlds of below, Earth's surface, and above.

(gentle music continues) - [Narrator] Another sign of this bonding, a distinct form of linear lines unique in North America, A vast system of what appear to be ancient Chaco roads.

- [Anna] How many miles of roads are here, and then how many are within the larger region of the Chaco world?

It'd be hard to calculate.

- [Richard] Really hard to calculate, because we just know a fraction of them.

And some of 'em you can trace 'em for a ways, and then they get hard to see.

So we don't know if the road continues, if it stops there.

But easily 20 to 30 miles in the canyon for sure, and then outside of the canyon, it's probably hundreds.

(footsteps crunching) Roads aren't easy to see.

Sagebrush growing on 'em, grass growing on 'em.

Roads either get covered or they get eroded out.

Sometimes we can't even see the road on the ground, - [Narrator] But the roads are there, from the air highlighted by the early morning sun, obscure traces of roadways are revealed.

The invisible becomes visible.

Hundreds of roads, 30 feet across, three to four feet deep.

- [Richard] And then come out and do some survey on them to find things that were left on the road, such as small pieces of pottery.

- [Narrator] Signs that a pot that required hours of labor to produce might be broken and individual pieces left at certain spots along the road as an offering or a form of commemoration.

- [Richard] It's difficult for us to interpret what might have been important and isn't, but the roads help us figure that out, and how everything is kind of linked together.

In this case, it could be alignments to these distant peaks.

And where they all converge is that spot, where the Great House has got the best visibility and then the Great Kiva over here for some other reason, - [Narrator] Even with close observation on the ground, and late afternoon flights using low angle sunlight, amid the contemporary roads, Chaco roads often remain hidden, until now.

Richard Friedman uses LIDAR to reveal an underlying reality.

Concealed beneath a forest canopy, Chaco roads stretch for miles across the landscape, whose full extent remains a tantalizing question.

- [Richard] If these roads weren't around, we wouldn't have near the understanding that we do now, because they've brought it, or forced us, to look at the bigger picture.

In the minds of the people who were here, it was all one thing.

And we divide it up.

Now with technology, we can put it back together and begin to think of it as they thought of it, and then it begins to make a whole lot more sense.

All the features on the landscape that were important to the people are integrated into the architecture.

(gentle music continues) - [Phillip] They're really not roads in the sense that we have a road.

I don't have the right term for 'em, but I call 'em spiritual pathways.

(gentle music) I'm going to use the word roads.

That's what everyone's familiar with.

You may have a road that leads off to some place that has spiritual meaning.

You have a Great House and you might have two, three, four roads leading out, or depending on how you look at it, into the Great House.

And you may choose to leave the Great House to get a mineral, to leave a prayer offering, making a pilgrimage out to that sacred site.

Then you come around and you come back.

That's transformative.

Then you're going to spiritually incorporate that into your life.

- [Narrator] Of the many roads that weave the tapestry of Chaco and the vast expanse of the Chaco world.

One road embodies the power and mystery of all the Chaco roads.

From each of the Great Houses in Chaco Canyon along the mesa, vertical roads rise from the canyon, join together and merge to become the Great North Road.

- And then we've got this unusual stairway between these two rooms, as well as up above here you can see toe holds going up the cliff and just below where you can see the toe holds there, there's a notch cutting the cliff on the right side, another notch on the left side where you could have had like a landing.

- Yeah.

- A ladder to get up to that point, then you could use the toe holds from that point on.

(gentle music) [Richard] You've got huge roads that don't look like they were used for transporting goods or people or things.

That's a tremendous amount of work for people who are using stone tools and wood tools.

The effort in creating the roads almost dwarfs the effort in creating the Great Houses themselves.

- [Anna] They went to this enormous effort of building the Great North Road, 35 miles, 30 foot wide, sometimes more.

Inexplicable, unless you say the power is in the land.

You don't see it until you're about 10 feet away.

You drop suddenly into Kutz Canyon.

You just have to get within a few feet before you understand that you just drop into this abyss.

(footsteps crunching) - [Petuuche] The Great Road North is a specific route from Pueblo Alto, what, to Kutz Canyon.

But it is also a way of life, both physical and non-physical way, that you're going back to your first place, how you came into being as humans as you emerged from the underworld to the surface.

- [Paul] The Great North Road may have not served a purpose as a road the way we know it today, but it was a road, nonetheless.

We all travel that North Road, we all travel back that same- to that same place, the place of beginning.

(uplifitng music continues) - [Anna] And then the South Road does the opposite, takes you south of Chaco, (gentle music) and you see this huge butte, Hosta Butte, south of Chaco.

That's the end of the South Road.

So they're drawing in the deep north with the towering south.

We see this tremendous coordination of the Chaco world.

The same architecture, the same pattern of roads, hundreds and hundreds of roads, and the massive effort to build all that.

And then the control to make it happen.

- A lot of work in putting this outside of the wall together, but in the inside you have rocks in there as well, stones, and then a nice facing on the other side, so you've got the core veneer masonry.

And to build this, they would've had to carry all the rocks here, both these and these, cut all these rocks to make 'em fit right, as well as bring all the mortar in and all the water, and the nearest quarry is one mile, the farthest quarry is five miles away.

Just incredible amount of work.

And then on top of that, to build the roofs in the building, put the roofs on the kivas, you had to bring in wood.

And the nearest source of wood is 40 miles away.

The farthest is about 65, so you're carrying all the timbers to build what?

About 240,000 timbers to build these structures in Chaco.

And this is just one building.

(mysterious music) - [Petuuche] We are going to be very careful coming back down later, 'cause it'll be much darker.

(trees rustle in the wind) - [Robert] They were harvesting trees from these slopes, carrying them all the way to Chaco.

[Robert[ Straight, tall timbers, and, of course, I think it makes sense they'd bring timbers from the different mountains, that each had a different association, you know?

Bringing in these different places.

- [Petuuche] Yeah, it could be, yeah, the special places, yeah.

Like this place here, it's a sacred mountain.

So you will want natural resources from this mountain.

- So quiet up here.

[Petuuche] All of this, the place where we're standing on a higher prominent location benefits humans being there, in that the Great Spirit allowing you that place for survival, whether you're on top of Mount Taylor or some other high position, you're offering that kind of gratitude from a higher point.

(gentle music) From horizon to horizon, you're offering your prayers.

Let's go folks.

(dramatic music) (thunder rolls) (birds calling) - [Narrator] All the elements of the Chaco world seem to gather force to motivate the people of Chaco, to build the roads and to construct the Great Houses and kivas with their own hands.

- [Elena] My experience of Chaco when I was a kid was that it was just this sort of amazing place that my ancestors built and then abandoned.

And as I got older, and the more I went back there, I started sensing a more dark feeling about it.

That brought up a lot more questions than just admiration.

- [Phillip] In our modern society, we see the sun and moon as inanimate objects.

They saw the sun and moon as living beings, living things, and as deities.

And you have to then see that, that being is making a difference in your life, and you have to attune yourself to it.

And when someone tells you that certain astronomic phenomena is gonna happen on this day, and it does happen, well there's a power in that of itself.

- [Elena] Learning about the cosmos, learning about the stars, that, in itself, is not dangerous.

When you achieve this level of knowledge and then you want to hoard it or you want to control it, or you want to use it to control other people, then it becomes arrogant, and then it becomes dangerous.

(mysterious music) - [Petuuche] And of course there are other stories that are almost unbelievable.

The ability to move mountains, or the ability to create water sources, or the ability to control lightning, that somehow people in Chaco had that kind of power.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] After 300 years, the Chaco era came to an end.

The kivas carefully dismantled, some burned, roads grown over, the Great Houses closed and sealed, portals no longer to be entered.

(ominous music) - [Petuuche] Humans have always had the good and the bad side, and so it's always a matter of choice which direction we're going to go.

You do hear stories, our own stories about conflicts at Chaco Canyon, and mainly over this powerful ability to control natural forces that the people there were beginning to abuse this power, that they were harming each other.

As a result of that battle between good and evil, the people's choice was to leave that evil behind and actually move.

Who are we to say that we are wiser today through science, that we know better?

(understated music) Who are we to say that we're much better than our ancestors who had decided that this kind of power is awesome and we will not teach it?

In the migration story of Pueblo people, two sisters came from the underworld to this land that we're now living on today.

And generally they are described as the one being the Indigenous sister, and the one that we define today as the white sister.

The white sister knew that she was gonna carry on the human behavior today through the mathematics or through the scientifical mode, through the use of metal.

And the Indigenous woman felt that her responsibility that she took on was the health and the welfare and caretaker of land and people, Mother Earth.

(thunder rolls) And this is where again, the prophecy being told that as the two sisters parted, the white woman going to the east and the Indigenous woman going to the west.

(thunder rolls) Upon their parting, the Indigenous woman predicted that they will come together as a child and mother, or as a family.

So that's what has occurred.

You sit here, I sit here.

You see all of us here, all the people around us today at this moment, we have come back together.

And we then, as a family, having to decide, is it going to continue to be this dominance over each other or is it going to be more a caretaking relationship on this earth, on this planet?

I think that's where we're at today.

(gentle music continues) - There is this change and there's this continuity of moving forward.

Always moving forward, never back.

But you can learn from the past.

If you don't learn from your past and from your history, you may be doomed to repeat that same mistake.

(mysterious music) - [Adriel] There is a kind of encroachment that's happening to these resources that are irreplaceable, that are non-renewable.

And that is the presence of the people on the landscape, what they have left behind.

They're being encroached upon, and they're being destroyed.

Some things are being lost forever, (fire hissing) (wistful music) - [Anna] But we still don't know the whole story, because of the immense complexity of Chaco, and because it challenges us, on so many levels of our own thinking, our cultural biases, perhaps still, and even more so, it challenges us to think in many dimensions.

And there's the other feeling, that at the very end they were completing something, and they were not abandoning, they were carefully sealing, a very intentional closing of the buildings.

- [Richard] It's very possible there was a grand plan and maybe when they're done with a site, it's no longer enhanced and then at some point it's closed because it's done now, it's served its purpose.

After a certain period of time we no longer use that site.

- [Petuuche] But you still maintain that spiritual connection to your ancestral places.

Even to this day we still go back to Aztec, or go back to Chaco.

They are the connection to our past.

These places are still sacred to our people.

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