This weekend, I headed up to Chaco Culture National Historic Park on the summer solstice to see traditional dancers. The Friends of Native Cultures have been organizing the appearance of native dancers each solstice since 2000, and I’ve been lucky enough to be at four out of the last five (you can see photos from 2004, 2006, 2007, and there are lots more photos of Chaco Culture at the Traditions of the Sun Website.)

The dancers perform in the plaza of the great house of Pueblo Bonito. For those of you who’ve never been to Chaco Canyon, Pueblo Bonito is largest of all the great houses found in the park, with nearly six hundred rooms, and it was three stories in some parts. Pueblo Bonito was built around 1000 AD and was continually built on for a few hundred years afterward, until the Chacoans left the area in 13th Century. Pueblo Bonito is a truly dramatic setting and it is a very emotional experience for those who dance; Chaco is the home of their ancestors after all.

This year the group of dancers were from Acoma Pueblo (which is the oldest, continually inhabited community in the U.S.). Below are some photos from their two morning dances. There are a few more photographs, including high-resolution versions on the Ideum Flickr site.

Dancing in the Plaza.

Marking the start of summer.

The two youngest dancers hold beautiful Acoma pottery.

Here are more photographs of the Cellicion Traditional Zuni Dancers celebrating the Summer Solstice at Chaco Canyon National Historical Park. To witness the dances at Chaco was an amazing experience. As Fernando Cellicion, Director of the dance group, noted, “it is hard to describe the feeling that we have dancing at the same place where the same thing was happening thousands of years ago.”

Raydean Johnson (foreground) peforms the Turkey Dance. Also pictured: Belyle Johnson and Alexandra Nastacio.

Raydean Johnson and Xyla Johnson perform the Turkey Dance.

Dancers Xyla Johnson, Tanicia Nastacio, and Alexandra Nastacio perform the Pottery Dance.

Aldean Nastacio performs the Buffalo Dance.

Musicians Florentine Johnson (left) and Fernando Cellicion perform their original song, Redrocks.

Yesterday a few of us headed up to Chaco Culture National Historical Park to celebrate the summer solstice and to see and film dancers from Zuni Pueblo. Since 2001, the park and the Friends of Native Cultures have been organizing the appearance of native dancers each solstice. Chaco is considered an ancestral homeland for the Pueblo people, so the events surrounding solstice at the park are quite powerful.

Last year, we took pictures and met dancers from Hopi. Three years ago, we photographed the Tewa Dancers From the North for the Traditions of the Sun project with NPS and NASA. This year the Fernando Cellicion Traditional Zuni Dancers performed in the plaza of the great house of Pueblo Bonito. We saw three dances, the Turkey Dance, the Pottery Dance, and the Buffalo Dance–which the photographs below show.

We have many photographs of all three dances we’re still sorting through them. Myself or Emily will post more over the next few days.

We just back from a quick weekend trip to Chaco Culture National Historical Park. For those of you who are familiar with Ideum, you probably know that we’ve been involved with the park over the last few years, and have developed the website and a book for NASA’s Traditions of the Sun project focusing on archaeoastronomy in Chaco Canyon.

This weekend we were in the park to help photograph a possible lunar alignment, but due to cloud cover, that didn’t quite turn out as we had hoped. However, I was lucky enough to be able to capture a beautiful double rainbow over the great house of Pueblo Bonito.

The park received a great deal of much needed rain just before we arrived and during our stay. It was great to see Chaco wash flowing although we had to cross it (waist deep!) to try for our lunar alignment shot. On the hike back that evening we were treated to an amazing show as an electrical storm raged off to the east.

I hope to post some more photos from Chaco Culture later this week, we’re off to San Francisco tonight. We’re going to photograph Scramble for Africa, an installation by Yinka Shonibare. It’s part of the Looking Both Ways: Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora exhibition at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD). These photographs will be used in an interactive exhibit we’re developing with the museum.

Here’s some more photographs from our trip to Chaco Culture National Historical Park on the Summer Solstice. As I mentioned in the previous post the dancers are Hopi and are from Second Mesa, Arizona.

Deer dancer makes a call.

Three girls with feathers.

The youngest dancer.

A hunter dancer.

The entire group in the Plaza of the great house, Pueblo Bonito.