AMERICA - Summary

In North America, a civilization arose which transformed a semi-desert into a cultivated landscape. The Ancient Pueblo peoples of the Southwest imposed a new geometry on the landscape. At Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, stand the ruins of what was once a complex of structures with more than 800 rooms. The rooms were stacked on top of one another in a huge semi-circle, a plan that the Pueblo people devised and kept to for 200 years. The timbers that supported the vast roofs of the dwellings were brought by hand from forests over 60 miles away.

Around the buildings lay carefully cultivated fields with crops of maize and squash. To allow crops to grow in such an arid environment, the Pueblo people created an ingenious system of irrigating channels. Dug deep into the rocks and dirt of the surrounding mesa tops, these channels captured droplets of rain from passing storms or melting snow. The water then fed into fields where it was retained by built-up earth around each plant. This "waffle" irrigation system sustained a growing population for several hundred years. But after a series of persistent droughts towards the end of the twelfth century, even these levels of ingenuity could not help the settlement. It was eventually abandoned.