(gentle music)
Narrator: Massive stone buildings with hundreds
of rooms are evidence of an ancient,
but once thriving culture, in the Chaco Canyon area
of New Mexico.
Anthropology Professor Carrie Heitman visited the area
for the first time as a college student.
-: Being able to discover and sort of have
your curiosity sparked by that experience was
really powerful, and it just inspires you to ask why
and why and why and why.
It's just that, you know, 20 odd years later,
I'm still asking those same kind of questions.
Narrator: Heitman and her colleagues have created
a book and multimedia project with an important goal.
-: We're trying to educate and share information about
that landscape from various perspectives
so that we can do the best we can
to preserve it into the future.
Narrator: Oil and gas exploration threatens
areas of the canyon.
An effort is underway to locate ancient sites
beneath the surface and provide that information
to the Bureau of Land Management.
-: If a site location wasn't digitized,
if it wasn't in the database of like the state
of New Mexico, for instance, it didn't exist,
it effectively didn't exist for the decision-making process.
So they were kind of making decisions
without the full spectrum of information.
-: The book project is also a collaboration
with indigenous people of the area.
The online edition features videos with cultural experts,
sometimes in their native language.
(man speaking in a foreign language)
Together, Heitmann and other stakeholders hope
to protect the area for the future.
-: It's part of who we are as a nation, right?
Understanding the history of the nation going back
to early inhabitants and being really proud and in awe
of what native people of this continent did
and accomplished: their engineering, their artistry,
their rich and complex belief systems.
(gentle music)