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.
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This open area is the plaza or courtyard. It served much the same function as a town square where ceremonial dances and other group activities took place. Also, when weather permitted, much of the daily domestic work was done here—shelling corn, twisting cordage, scraping hides, firing pottery, and fashioning tools of stone, bone and wood.
The plaza was divided by a single row of rooms into two courts. Many grinding stones were found in these rooms which served as one of two community centers for mealing corn into flour. Corn was ground on a large troughed stone, the metate (meh-TAH-tay), with a smaller, loaf-shaped stone, the mano. The metates were arranged in a line of bins where several women could work together. Another milling center was in four adjacent rooms in the east wing.