The Southwest Colorado Humanities Roundtable has coordinated a month of history, anthropological, and archaeological events in La Plata County this September.
Presented by the San Juan Basin Archeological Society (SJBAS) and the Department of Anthropology, Fort Lewis College (FLC)
Contact: Janice Sheftel, Janicesheftel@gmail.com or check SJBAS.org
The Solstice Project is an interdisciplinary team of archeologists, archaeoastronomers, geodesists, and remote sensing experts that studies the heritage of the Chaco culture. Founded in 1978, following the rediscovery of the Sun Dagger site on Fajada Butte in Chaco Canyon, the Project researches the achievements of the Chaco people: how they envisioned a cosmology through monumental buildings, non-utilitarian roads, and rigorous geometries in a vast desert landscape. The Project has undertaken new, groundbreaking research that shows the immense region of the Chaco world, using aerial imagery, precise surveying techniques, and LIDAR. Insights come from Project Puebloan advisers, combined with new understandings of Mesoamerican parallels for cardinal directions, the interplay of vertical and horizontal axes, ritual roads, cacao, shells, spirals, and the sun and the moon.