Chaco Canyon

Chaco Canyon is a magical place. It is filled with the ruins of one of the most amazing cultures to have existed in north america. These people blossomed in the 800's and continued for about 300 years.

This site was excavated by a series of expeditions sponsored by National Geographic (as attested by a plaque) and some parts (I don't know which) were reconstructed. Nevertheless, it wasn't all rebuilt and to my untrained eye, there is no way to tell where the 'new' begins the old stops. The construction is really amazing. There are places where there are horizontal stripes of darker stone in the walls and the rebuilt portions (according to the info I have, not that I could tell old and new) match this perfectly. As you can see below the buildings here were large with massive walls.

That this was built in less than hundreds of years (whole settlements were built in the 800's), it a tribute to the work ethic of these people.

There were lots of somebodies beavering away cutting stones to a specific range of stone sizes and doing so in astronomical quantities to make such walls possible.