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Yet, even knowing the likely birthplace of Pueblo Bonito's Plaza Tree, the mystery of its purpose remains, Guiterman said. Finally, it was buried by windblown sand over the centuries." It could have toppled or been left standing to eventually collapse onto the plaza. Following its death, by either natural causes or cutting, it was transported to Pueblo Bonito in the 12th century, where it was either abandoned or employed for some purpose (possibly as a standing pole). "We will never know exactly when it died because its outer sapwood rings were lost to decay," the authors wrote, "but we estimate that it was living until the early 1100s. The tree lived in the Chuska Mountains for more than 250 years. Instead, it most likely was hauled in from the Chuska Mountain range 50 miles west of Chaco Canyon, probably along with many other ponderosa pine beams used in construction. "Trees from the San Juan Mountains, the Jemez Mountains or the Chuska Mountains – they all have their own kind of flavor, their own peculiar signature."īased on the combined analyses of the available evidence, Guiterman and his co-authors conclude that the Plaza Tree of Pueblo Bonito did not grow in Pueblo Bonito or Chaco Canyon. "We have this incredible database from 100-plus years of tree-ring science," said Guiterman, who has dated hundreds of trees.
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While winter precipitation patterns are fairly uniform across Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado, the summer rainstorms known as monsoons are much more local, Guiterman explained, and the resulting variation in tree-ring patterns allows researchers to match a wood sample to the area where it grew. They scrutinized documentary records, including unpublished correspondence and reports from the early archeological expeditions, strontium isotope signatures from pine trees living in the Chaco Canyon area today and tree-ring patterns that allow scientists to pinpoint the source of the wood in question. To find out where the plaza tree had come from, Guiterman and his co-authors assembled three lines of evidence, "not unlike building a legal case," as he put it. The data revealed that the tree did not grow where it was found, and is therefore unlikely to have played a role as significant as various authors have ascribed to it ever since it was discovered in 1924. Credit: University of ArizonaĪ study published in the journal American Antiquity provides new data that calls into question the long-held view of the Plaza Tree of Pueblo Bonito as the sole living tree in an otherwise treeless landscape, around which a regional metropolis in New Mexico's Chaco Canyon was built.Ĭombining various lines of evidence, the study is the first to apply a technique called dendroprovenance to a sample of the plaza tree that uses tree-ring growth patterns to trace the tree's origin. This digital reconstruction of Pueblo Bonito during its peak occupation depicts the "tree of life," which was long believed to have grown in the plaza. The ponderosa pine ( Pinus ponderosa) log was discovered in 1924, and since then, it has been included in “birth” and “life” narratives of Pueblo Bonito, although these ideas have not been rigorously tested.