Chaco Canyon ruins visit

I am just back from a four day flying visit to Chaco Canyon in New Mexico.  We left LA in warm sunshine and arrived at Albuquerque in the freezing cold and snow.  Luckily, Noreen, one of my graduate students who wants to work at Chaco Canyon on the ruins there, is a demon driver in cold and rough conditions and coped brilliantly.  The sandstone 'Great Houses' and ceremonial spaces at Chaco were occupied between about 850 and 1250 AD and are the visible remains of a complex and advanced society.  Think about what was going on in England at the same time - ruined medieval abbeys and cathedrals are now also some of the few visible reminders of the medieval period in our landscape.  At Chaco, the extreme climate (hot and dry in the summer, often very cold and occasionally snowy in the winter) is causing rapid deterioration to the ruins and reburying them in soil is perhaps the only way to preserve them - which is what Noreen is hoping to study.

Chaco Canyon in the snow