The Pueblo, or Anasazi, develop an advanced culture in northwestern New Mexico.

Chaco Canyon, a major regional center of from fifteen hundred to five thousand people, is surrounded by standardized planned towns, or great houses, built from the wood of over two hundred thousand trees.

Thirty-foot-wide roads, flanked by berms, radiate from Chaco in various directions.

Small blocks of aboveground masonry rooms and a kiva make up a typical pueblo.

Great kivas grow to fifty to seventy feet in diameter.

Pottery consists of corrugated gray bisque and decorated black-on-white in addition to some decorated red and orange vessels.

Shells and turquoise are imported.

The Great kiva (Hopi for “old house,” a large ceremonial chamber) of Chaco Canyon, a major center of ancestral Puebloan culture and a hub of ceremony, trade, and administration for the prehistoric Four Corners are, is constructed around 1000.

A a large enclosed area for religious activity and ceremony, it is somewhat isolated from the rest of Chaco Canyon.

It is on the south side of Chaco Wash, adjacent to a Chacoan road moving up steep stairs to the top of the sandstone mesa.

The kiva stands alone, with no residential or support structures, and originally had a thirty nine foot passageway from the underground kiva to several aboveground levels.