Learn about the "Casas Grande Paquime": Paquime, also known as Casas Grandes, the great Pueblan in NW Chihuahua ascended as a major regional presence during the 13th and 14th centuries, in the midst of a period marked by unprecedented cultural splintering and dislocations in the surrounding areas.
 Paquime left an extraordinarily rich archaeological record, which began with single story adobe walled room blocks early in the second millennium, and culminated in 20 room clusters by the 12th century, all served by a single water control system.
Casas Grandes is the contemporary name given to a pre-Columbian archaeological zone and its central site, located in NW Mexico in the modern-day Mexican state of Chihuahua. Regarded as one of the most significant archaeological zones in the northwestern region, Casas Grandes is centered in a wide, fertile valley on the Casas Grandes or San Miguel river, some 35 miles south of Janos and 150 miles NW of the state capital, Chihuahua.
 The archaeological zone is contained within the eponymous modern municipio of Casas Grandes. The valley and region has long been inhabited by indigenous groups.
Paquime emerged from shadowy origins early in the thirteenth century. It became the largest and most culturally complex settlement in northern Mexico and the southwestern United States.
It bore the imprints of both the puebloan cultures of the Southwest and the great Mesoamerican cultures of southern Mexico and central America. It served as a cultural beacon for prehistoric people within a thirty thousand square mile area, which encompassed far west Texas, southern New Mexico, southeastern Arizona, northeastern Sonora and northern Chihuahua.
It collapsed in the mid-fifteenth century, perhaps a century before the arrival of the Spanish, who first spoke of the ruin in 1560. |
