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The rooms surrounding you are part of the old, southeast-facing pueblo, built between 919 and about 936, over and around which the grander Pueblo Bonito was built 100 years later. Note the cruder masonry and thinner walls. The vertical poles incorporated into the wall in front of you represent an earlier method of construction. Often the poles supported a matting or wattle of small branches which served as lath to hold a thin wall of mud plaster. Later the people used small posts as a frame for stacking hand-molded adobe bricks or stones, and still later began to lay ashlar courses in which the strength was gained by lapping stones across the joints between stones in the course below. When Pueblo Bonito was built, the eastern end of the old pueblo was leveled to make way for new rooms, and some rooms at the southwest end were torn out when kivas were put in.
Hyde Expedition camped behind Pueblo Bonito, 1890’s
Many of the old rooms were filled with trash and it is possible that the smaller pueblo was not occupied when the new builders started to work on the later structure. Eight or more of the rooms (including the one you are standing in) had been used as burial chambers for more than 90 individuals.
The burials that have been found in Chaco have been of the people who preceded the builders of Bonito and the other great pueblos, or of contemporaries of theirs from the many smaller pueblos in the canyon, or of members of a small group that moved into the canyon from the north after Pueblo Bonito was largely, if not entirely, abandoned. So far archeologists have not discovered how, or where, the considerable population that lived in Pueblo Bonito, Chetro Ketl and other large houses disposed of their dead.
The modern roofs in this area protect remains of original ceilings.