Return to Chaco Canyon Episode 2: Una Vida

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:23]Hello everybody, Ben Woodruff here and in today's video we are going to be visiting a Chocoan great house called Unavita and we're going to go visit it in person. But first, we got to have a little bit of background because this is episode two in our series, Return to Choco Canyon. Uh Choco Canyon is a passion for me. Uh and it's got so much history. There are people living there for thousands of years. But around 800 AD, all of a sudden, there was this huge cultural explosion. And we're going to be uh kind of diving into that cultural explosion by visiting all of the major great houses. So until this time, people mostly lived in pit houses and kas and small dwellings and small pblo communities. But starting with the site we're going to visit today, Unavita, suddenly there were these great house communities. Normally they were shaped in a Dshape. Um and normally they had hundreds of rooms. Now Unavita had about 60 to 180 rooms give or take. It's a basically an unexavated site. Um, but it was the first, arguably the first of the great houses. Now, eventually these would get bigger and bigger until like PBlo Bonito where you have like seven or 800 rooms, you know, four and five stories tall, absolutely epic, enormous structures. So, this grew and it built and it got bigger and bigger and bigger.

[00:01:50]Now, uh, we'll go more into depth on why we believe this happened, but today we're just going to visit the first of the great houses, and it's not the greatest of the great houses because you went from tiny to this is at the time, this thing would have been insane. There would have been nothing like it in the southwest. A structure this big with like 160 to 180 rooms, it would have been insane. So, we're going to visit it. We're going to talk a little bit about it. Um, unfortunately, there has been very little archaeological work done here. And so, mostly we're going to visit it and I'm going to uh play some Native American flute music. I I make and play Native American flutes. We'll play that while we just I want you to experience it. I want you to go and see what it's like to visit this site. Now, later in this series, we're going to be visiting the much larger great houses, but we're kind of going along the canyon, and this is the first of them.

[00:02:43]And so we're going to be looking later on at much more intact great houses where we know what happened in specific rooms. We're going to go room by room and we're going to talk about what happened in specific rooms in later videos. But this this is a good start to understanding Choco Canyon because again Unavita really is the birth of the Chocoan great house explosion. So let's go ahead and visit this site and talk about it. I'm here at the Unavita great house at Choco Canyon. This is arguably the oldest of the true great houses.

[00:03:18]This great house was formed about 800 AD, which is pretty far back when it comes to the great house style and the great house community. This is a true capital D-shaped great house as opposed to the later Mcelroy style. Now this this this uh these ruins has about 160 rooms and it's right across from Fahadabute. Fahadabute is at the center of Chakan cosmology and up on Fahadabute there is a petetroglyph that is D-shaped just like this probably made at the same time up there on that beautiful mea that has important petetroglyphs that mark the movements of the sun and the solar calendar. So there was a connection directly across from this. This is a mostly unexavated site. It's well marked. It's well mapped and it's fairly well understood at the ground level, but it basically has not been excavated much down in. We're going to go check it out.

[00:04:13]Now, the beautiful thing about it, if you see there's people walking out to it behind us, you almost can't even see it.

[00:04:19]It blends in with the landscape. And that's what I love about Chocoin style architecture. It's made out of the landscape and it blends in. And if you don't even know it's there, you might not even see it. I think it's a beautiful way to live. In today's world, we have this harsh landscape that we just like it seems like it's at odds.

[00:04:37]The land and human construction. This it's filled in with the land. It's in harmony and it's beautiful. But let's go check it out. We're going to take around and look at it and uh we're going to film, do a little bit of voice over and explain what we're looking at. But most of this is unexavated. So, it's mostly going to be a pile of hills and some beautiful walls. Let's go check it out.

[00:04:56]It's May here at Unavita in Choco Canyon. We're in the shade. It's morning. It's pleasantly cool. I like it cold. It's lovely right now. And it's going to be blistering hot in just a few hours. As soon as this sunlight over here hits us, that's how it was anciently for the Chakawans. There's times where it was really hot and there's times where it was snowy. This is a land of harsh environment. Today, we have an amazing world where we can control heat and cool in our own homes artificially. They could build fires, but they didn't have windows. They didn't have heating. They didn't have air conditioning.

[00:05:33]And so, it's something to consider.

[00:05:35]Where do you build and why? Why do they build at this spot? Walking up to the ruins, you see that whole spread there?

[00:05:44]That is all the great house. We're going to get closer. We're going to see that these walls have collapsed. And when walls collapse in that way, it makes a pile. You can see that one little structure up top, but all the rest of that hill in front of you is not a hill.

[00:05:59]That is all just actual walls that have collapsed in on themselves.

[00:06:09]There's stairs that go up to some of the upper levels, but you're actually still climbing up piles of walls. It's strange being in a largely unexavated site such as this because there's so much history underfoot.

[00:06:26]You can't help but wonder what treasures of knowledge are buried underneath.

[00:06:31]There could be one artifact, one piece of information that might change our entire understanding of Choco Canyon and of the people of the Southwest, but it's buried underneath.

[00:06:44]just makes your imagination run wild.

[00:06:51]The masonry is very beautiful, but this is among the earliest. Look how wide these walls are. Even though this this uh great house only had a a few hundred rooms, it was still a true Choco and great house, which means the floors themselves, the walls had foundations that went several feet underground and the walls themselves were, you know, 2 to 3 ft thick. And that depth and that structural integrity, the extra effort to put that much is part of what makes it a great house. So again, what we look for is the size and the shape and the style of masonry. Now, some of this would be considered fairly primitive for Choco if you look at how these bricks are laid, but still compared to other PBLO and sites throughout the Southwest, you know, you have shaped stones, you have a nice rectangular wall. Uh so even though chakan masonry a few hundred years later developed into very ornate patterning um even this still shows all the hallmarks of being true Choco and masonry.

[00:08:07]Now a lot of these walls uh were two or three stories tall in existence. And again, that hill in front of you is walls buried underneath.

[00:08:20]Now, the general idea of why not to excavate and to just take your time is once one of these sites are excavated properly, the sediments that were stabilizing the walls are no longer there. And so, it requires a lot of modern stabilization to keep these from falling apart. So, in the state they are in now, they're actually more stabilized than if the National Park Service came in and did some legitimate structural uh supports.

[00:08:57]I just wish desperately that I knew what was buried in these hills underneath these these footsteps we take. That's what I really want is to know what was the true story of what happened here.

[00:09:18]You can see sometimes when the walls fall down, they fall in certain patterns that are recognizable.

[00:09:25]You can see some curvature to this wall in here.

[00:09:29]And you see Fajabute there in the background. Again, that is the center of Choco and cosmology and was no doubt part of the reason why the people of Unavita built where they did because they were right next to the allimportant Fahadabute.

[00:09:48]Later, uh, Choco and great houses just kept building further and further down the canyon, but we have reason to believe that Fajabute was still at the center of their thought process.

[00:10:01]You can see these posts. These are not windows. These are holes that beams were put into. Uh the logs from the Chushka Mountains 15 miles away were hauled on foot for these beams and since then they have rotted away and completely disintegrated. But throughout Choco we do find some of these beams still intact. But again, Unavita is the earliest great house. So it has the least amount of organic material still intact and available to see and do anything to be able to see the ghosts of the past. I wish we had a way to magically see the people here going about their lives and see what actually happened at this beautiful location and to see it all intact.

[00:11:03]But this is the great house of Unavoida.

[00:11:14]Well, I hope you enjoyed coming along on this. Uh, I really enjoy making this series and sharing it with you. And it's hard to get out to Choco. It takes a lot of work and a lot of planning. And so I'm hoping by doing this it gives you a feel for what it's like to actually visit these sites. Stay tuned because our upcoming episodes, the ruins are going to be far more exciting and we're going to go far more indepth. Um, so this is just a brief getting your toes wet into what Choco Canyon is all about.

[00:11:42]So more to come and excited to have you.

[00:11:45]So thank you for watching. If you haven't already, if you could hit subscribe, I very much appreciate it.

[00:11:49]And always remember that life is a gift.

[00:11:52]So never stop learning and never stop exploring. We'll see you next time.