In northwestern New Mexico, Chaco Culture National Historical Park preserves an extraordinary concentration of pre-Columbian pueblo ruins in Chaco Canyon, a place still sacred to Hopi and Pueblo people with ancestral ties to it. From about 900 to 1150, Chaco was a major center of Ancestral Puebloan life, where people built monumental great houses such as Pueblo Bonito using quarried sandstone and timber hauled from distant mountains. Its immense construction, turquoise working, and long-distance exchange reflect its importance as a regional hub of ceremony, trade, and authority. After prolonged drought and environmental strain, the great buildings were sealed and abandoned, but the canyon remains a protected archaeological landscape and living ancestral homeland.