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Scarlet Macaws Buried in a New Mexico Great House

By Weird Burial Stories Editorial Desk · 2026-10-09

Room 38 at Pueblo Bonito, built in the ninth century, held twelve scarlet macaw skeletons in a layer of guano. Two more macaws were buried in hollows in the corners of the floor.

By C. V. Wooster

Room 38 at Pueblo Bonito, in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, was built in the ninth century and held the skeletons of twelve scarlet macaws in a layer of guano about 25 centimetres thick, with two more macaws buried in hollows dug into the southeastern and southwestern corners of the floor. Thirty macaws have been found at Pueblo Bonito, fourteen of them in that room, and a 2018 DNA study of fourteen birds from Chaco Canyon and the Mimbres region points to a breeding center that has not been found.

The room

Pueblo Bonito is the largest of the Chacoan great houses. Adam S. Watson, Stephen Plog, and their colleagues, in a 2015 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, describe it as a pueblo of about 650 rooms, built in several episodes. Chaco Canyon, they write, had multistoried great houses from the ninth through the early twelfth centuries. Room 38 is in the northern section. It is the largest room there, and it was constructed in the ninth century.

The same paper is specific about the birds. "These included the skeletons of 12 scarlet macaws imbedded in a 25-cm-thick layer of bird guano. Two additional macaws were buried in hollows dug in the southeastern and southwestern corners of the floor." Later faunal analysis gives a minimum of fourteen scarlet macaws from the room. Eleven of those were sampled for radiocarbon dating. An American Museum of Natural History news release, carried by EurekAlert, puts the same counts in one sentence: "The remains of 30 macaws have been found in Pueblo Bonito, including 14 in a single structure: Room 38." The paper's wider count is thirty from Pueblo Bonito out of thirty-five scarlet macaw skeletons recovered in Chaco Canyon. The release calls Room 38, on the strength of the guano, "likely a sort of aviary." The guano is the evidence that birds were kept in the room, not only buried in it. The two in the floor hollows are the burials.

The Death Glossary uses "grave goods" for objects placed with the dead. These macaws are not goods in a human coffin. They are the dead, set into the floor of a room that also held their droppings. A dog buried in the same grave as two people, near Bonn and much earlier, is the other animal interment in this week's archive: the Bonn-Oberkassel dogs.

Kept there, not bred there

The 2015 paper is careful about breeding, and it points the other way. The number of macaws in one room, and the guano, are unparalleled in the northern Southwest, the authors write, but faunal analysts had concluded that macaws were not bred at Pueblo Bonito or elsewhere in the northern Southwest. Of thirty-four Chaco macaws studied earlier by Lyndon Hargrave, only one may have reached breeding age. No nestlings or juveniles under four months were found. No breeding pens and no macaw eggshells have been reported from Bonito. Paquimé, in northern Mexico, about 630 kilometres south, is the contrast: hundreds of macaws, pens, and eggshells. Room 38 was a place where birds were kept and, in two cases, buried. It is not, on this paper, a hatchery.

The dates on the sampled bones fall in the Chacoan centuries, and most of them fall before the great burst of building that archaeologists call the Chaco florescence, about AD 1040 to 1110. Twelve of the fourteen sampled macaws predate that peak. One cluster, four from Room 38 and two from Room 78, has ranges between AD 885 and 990. A second cluster, all from Room 38, falls between AD 970 and 1035. The news release says the birds were brought from Mesoamerica starting in the early tenth century. The paper's point is the chronology: the macaws were acquired while the canyon's hierarchy was already forming, not only at its architectural height. Scarlet macaws do not live in New Mexico. Their historic range, the paper says, is humid forest in tropical America. Getting a live bird to Chaco was a long procurement. The paper does not claim each skeleton was a sacrifice. It treats the birds as status markers and as evidence of a network.

The breeding center that is still missing

A later study, reported by Smithsonian Magazine on 13 August 2018, asked where the birds were born. Katherine J. Wu's article says a team led by Richard George, then at Pennsylvania State University, analyzed the bones of fourteen scarlet macaws from five sites in Chaco Canyon and the Mimbres region of New Mexico. The magazine's sentence is the one to keep: they "analyzed the bones of 14 scarlet macaws recovered from five sites in Chaco Canyon and the Mimbres region of New Mexico." Mitochondrial DNA, passed from mothers to offspring, was the tool. The fourteen birds were extremely similar. The magazine says it appeared that 71 percent of them likely shared a maternal lineage.

That result does not fit a story in which each bird was caught separately in the tropics. Macaws range widely. Related mothers, in bird after bird, suggest a breeding group. The magazine says the researchers turned to a northern breeding center, one that had been doubted. Paquimé has an aviary and more than 300 macaws, but Paquimé's height is later, about 1250 to 1450, and Chaco's height is about 850 to 1150. Radiocarbon dates put the studied birds in the Chacoan era. The New Mexican macaws, the article says, came from an older, more northerly site that has not been found. The researchers place that center in the North American Southwest or in northwestern Mexico, and they do not name the spot. George is quoted to the effect that it was probably small, given how inbred the Chaco and Mimbres birds appear.

The two findings sit side by side without cancelling. Room 38 held living birds, on the evidence of the guano, and two of them were buried in the floor. The 2015 paper says they were not bred in that room. The 2018 study, as Smithsonian reports it, says the birds' mothers belonged to a breeding population somewhere else, still undiscovered. The hollows in the corners are the burial. The missing aviary is a genetic inference, not a room anyone has dug.

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