Chaco Culture National Historical Park is a United States National Historical Park and World Heritage Site which contains the densest and most exceptional concentration of large pueblos in the American Southwest. The park is located in northwestern New Mexico, between Albuquerque and Farmington, in a relatively inaccessible valley cut by the Chaco Wash. The park preserves one of America's most fascinating cultural and historic areas.

Between 850 BC and AD 1250, Chaco Canyon was a major center of ancestral Puebloan culture. It was a hub of ceremony, trade, and administration for the prehistoric Four Corners area - unlike anything before or since. Chaco is remarkable for its monumental public and ceremonial buildings, and its distinctive architecture. Building construction, and creating the associated Chacoan roads, ramps, dams, and mounds, required a great deal of well organized and skillful planning, designing, resource gathering, and construction.

The Chacoan cultural sites are fragile and irreplaceable and represent a significant part of America's cultural heritage. At least one site in the park, Fajada Butte, which had been the focus of a television documentary, has been closed to the public due to fears of erosion caused by tourists. The sites are part of the sacred homeland of Pueblo Indian peoples of New Mexico, the Hopi Indians of Arizona, and the Navajo Indians of the Southwest, all of whom continue to respect and honor them.

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