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Tagged “indigenous-engineering”

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  Cliff Palace

  How did Ancestral Puebloan builders raise the largest cliff dwelling in North America — roughly 150 rooms and 23 kivas of shaped sandstone and mortar — inside a sheer canyon alcove reached only by pecked hand-and-toe holds, and why, within a few generations of finishing it, did they abandon it entirely?

  c. 1190-1260 CE (Ancestral Puebloan) · Mesa Verde National Park, Montezuma County, Colorado, United StatesAdded July 2026
• HIGH WONDER

  Pueblo Bonito

  How did Ancestral Puebloans, working without draft animals, the wheel, or metal tools, plan and raise a roughly 800-room, four-to-five-story great house — and haul in tens of thousands of conifer logs from mountains up to 70 miles away — and what, precisely, was Pueblo Bonito for?

  c. 850-1150 CE (Ancestral Puebloan) · Chaco Culture National Historical Park, New Mexico, United StatesAdded July 2026