Park Tools

Outliers

Kin Klizhin

As its name implies, Chaco Culture National Historical Park includes more than just Chaco Canyon. While Chacoan Culture was centered within the canyon with its spectacular great houses and dense concentration of monumental architecture, Chacoan influence extended much further, throughout the San Juan Basin and even a bit beyond. The whole region contains outlying great houses, which show many of the same features as the great houses in Chaco Canyon (core-and-veneer masonry, large-scale planning, exaggerated size relative to other buildings in the immediate area), though generally on a smaller scale. These outlying great houses, and the great kivas and communities of small-house sites, with which they are usually associated, show clear evidence of the spread of the Chacoan system throughout a remarkably wide area.

Pueblo Pintado and Kin Klizhin great houses are open to the public. Information and directions are available at the park visitor center. You can download a map (81/2 X 11 144kb pdf) to the outliers here. (To get the Free Adobe Reader, which is required to read the pdf files,click here.)

Four outliers are:

Kin Klizhin ("black house"); famous for its impressive tower kiva, located along a wash that empties into the Chaco River just west of the park boundary. You can download a brochure on Kin Klizhin here (81/2 X 14 187kb pdf).

Pueblo Pintado ("painted town"); perched on an impressive promontory overlooking the Chaco Wash 15 miles upstream from the main park units, near the modern Navajo community of Pueblo Pintado, New Mexico. You can download a brochure on Pueblo Pintado here (81/2 X 14 133kb pdf).

Kin Bineola ("house in which the wind whirls"); CLOSED No public access.

Kin Ya'a ("towering house"); CLOSED No public access.

In addition to the outliers included within the park, there are several other outlying great houses that are open to the public. Some of these are at other National Park Service units, while others are owned and protected by other entities. They include: