Located in Chaco Culture National Historic Park in New Mexico, Chaco Canyon hosts numerous small dwellings and a handful of multi-story buildings known as great houses. The team calculated that Chacoans could have, at most, farmed just 100 acres of the Chaco Canyon floor. In short, there would have been a lot of hungry mouths in Chaco Canyon. Chaco Canyon residents either imported most of their food from surrounding regions 60 to 100 miles away, or the dwellings in the canyon were never permanently occupied, instead serving as temporary shelters for people making regular pilgrimages. “Whether people are bringing in maize to feed 2,300 residents, or if several thousand visitors are bringing in their own maize to eat, they’re not obtaining it from Chaco Canyon,” Benson said.