Shedding light: 'Written on the Landscape' delves deeper into Chaco Canyon

Forty-six years.

That’s the amount of time that has passed since Anna Sofaer began The Solstice Project.

The move came after Sofaer’s rediscovery of the Sun Dagger site on Fajada Butte in Chaco Canyon.

The organization is an interdisciplinary team of archaeologists, archaeoastronomers, geodesists and remote sensing experts that studies the rich heritage of the ancient Chaco culture in the American Southwest.

Shedding light: 'Written on the Landscape' delves deeper into Chaco Canyon

The team continues to research, publish and present their findings on the achievements of the Chaco people; how they envisioned an order of cosmology through monumental buildings, non-utilitarian roads and rigorous geometries, in a vast expanse of a remote and inhospitable desert.

Their first two films, “The Sun Dagger” and “The Mystery of Chaco Canyon” document how the Chaco culture developed a complex astronomy and aligned their ceremonial architecture with the cycles of the sun and moon.

Sofaer and team have created a 3D interactive model of the stunning Sun Dagger site, demonstrating in real time how three rock slabs cast light patterns that mark the solar and lunar cycles on spiral rock carvings. The model shows what the eye cannot readily see: how the Chaco people intricately united these phenomena at one site.

The third film, “Written on the Landscape: Mysteries Beyond Chaco Canyon,” illustrates their new ground-breaking research that shows the immense region of the Chaco world, using aerial imagery, precise surveying techniques, and LiDAR (aerial laser scanning).

Insights come from Puebloan advisers combined with new understanding of Mesoamerican parallels, for cardinal directions, the interplay of vertical and horizontal axes, ritual “roads,” cacao, shells, spirals, and the sun and moon. The film serves as a clarion call to protect this ancient resource from degradations of the landscape through energy extraction and disregard for the environment.

Sofaer says the last film broadcast in 2000 and her team was ready for a new film.

She learned so much more about Chaco over the course of the four decades.

“What we learned in the last 15 years is that Chaco expands so much further than the canyon. Even beyond the San Juan Basin,” she says. “With better technology and mapping, we find that these outlying sites go as far as 200 miles, or 150 miles from Chaco Canyon, which is really extraordinary. There are about 150 more pieces that are known.”

Sofaer says the people of Chaco Canyon had the influence to impact that entire region.

“We did a lot of looking in the new film, especially at the heart of it all, which is really Pueblo Bonito,” she says. “All of these places are connected, but not by roads. By being linear to each other. There’s a story that we’re getting into.”

Sofaer says through all the research, the team has found something called written landscape.

“The people of Chaco Canyon didn’t have writing in our way of writing and books and so forth,” she says. “The skills they had were different. They had knowledge, the engineering skills, architectural design, astronomical knowledge. Then they managed the vast region to replicate the same architecture and road structures. What kind of literacy is that? It’s another kind of writing on the landscape, knowing your topography. They learned so much from knowing the land, and the cycles of the sky. And putting the two together created this inspiring pattern to do what they did. And that’s a writing on the landscape.”