Chaco Outliers in the San Juan: The Roads Nobody Explained
Near Durango, Colorado
The Chaco Canyon civilization, centered in what is now northwestern New Mexico, built something unusual between roughly nine hundred and eleven hundred of the Common Era: a road network. Archaeological surveys have mapped approximately four hundred miles of roads radiating outward from Chaco Canyon, straight-line routes thirty feet wide cut into the desert surface and, in places, carved into cliff faces with steps. The roads connect Chaco to outlier communities distributed across a wide region.
Several of those outlier sites are in what is now the San Juan National Forest in southwestern Colorado, adjacent to the lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management and Mesa Verde National Park. The Chaco road system reaches into this terrain. Sites identified as Chacoan outliers by their architecture and material culture, great kivas, multistory masonry construction in the Chaco style, road segments connecting them to the canyon, appear across the northern San Juan basin.
What the roads were for is not fully resolved in the scholarly literature. They are far wider than foot traffic requires. They ignore topographic shortcuts that a practical trail would have taken. Some run parallel to each other without obvious explanation. Leading theories include that they functioned as ceremonial routes, as expressions of political authority, as corridors for pilgrimage, and as trade networks. None of these explanations excludes the others.
The Forest Service and the BLM manage access to outlier sites in this region, some of which are open to visitors and some of which are not stabilized sufficiently for public access.
The roads are still there. The purpose is still a question.
