A VERY DENSE CITY
This is a wide photograph. I intend it to give you a sense of the sheer density of this Chaco Canyon city. After the picture loads, scan it to the right.
I would not have wanted to live here myself. I get the impression that those who lived here were so closely surrounded by other people that they were necessarily submerged into an extremely intense and perhaps unrelenting social life that I would not have liked.
But such is the variability of culture that this is my own individualism speaking, and the lives of these people may have been very fulfilling to them according to their own values and goals.
The ruins are so extensive that I was reminded somewhat of the photographs of the German cities after the war.
The round walls that occur are often the remains of partially underground "kivas" that were important ceremonial and social locations for the whole culture. One of my Mesa Verde photos also shows them.
Kivas were a continuation of a much more ancient form of home (partially buried) which certainly has some advantages in an arid climate that can be very cold or very hot at times; for they protect you from the extremes of temperature. Kivas also had symbolic meaning for a people whose traditions defined their origin as an emergence from the ground into the higher world.
Apparently, various social and cultural groupings within the society had their own kivas. There appear to be several kivas in nearly every set of ruins.
Personal Notes - Travel: Chaco Canyon
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