The Colorado premiere of Anna Sofaer's third Solstice Project film, "Written on the Landscape: Mysteries Beyond Chaco Canyon," will be free and open to the public.

The showing, sponsored by the San Juan Basin Archeological Society, the Fort Lewis College Center of Southwest Studies and the FLC Concert Hall, will be introduced by the renowned Southwest writer Craig Childs. The film's national premiere will be on New Mexico PBS on June 20,2024., the summer solstice, at 7:00 pm.

"Written on the Landscape" illustrates the Solstice Project's ground-breaking research that shows the immense region of the Chaco World, using aerial imagery, precise surveying techniques and LIDAR (aerial laser scanning). Insights come from Puebloan advisors combined with new understandings of Mesoamerican parallels for cardinal directions, the interplay of vertical and horizontal axes, ritual roads, cacao, shells, spirals and the sun and the moon. The film also serves as a call to protect this ancient resource from degradation of the landscape from energy extraction and disregard of the environment.

The film follows the exploration by Anna Sofaer, Director of the Solstice Project, of the Chaco Canyon world of magnificent architecture that flourished 1000 years ago across 70,000 square miles of the American Southwest. This third film in Sofaer's Chaco Canyon trilogy, the prior two also shown on PBS, blends stories from indigenous and non-indigenous scholars to tell the story of an ancient culture with relevance for our contemporary society—both cultures, in the words of Petuuche Gilbert from Acoma Pueblo, having the choice between the good and the bad, between power used with wisdom and power capable of destroying the world.

The Solstice Project (SP) studies the astronomical heritage of the discovery of the Sun Dagger site on Fajada Butte in Chaco Canyon. The SP continues to research, publish, and present its findings on the achievements of the Chaco people, how they envisioned an order of cosmology through monumental buildings, non-utilitarian roads, and rigorous geometries. The SP has created a 3-D interactive model of three Sun Dagger site demonstrating in real time how three rock slabs cast light patterns that mark the solar and lunar cycles on the spiral rock carvings. The model shows what the eye cannot readily see: how the sun and the moon operate on the features carved into the landscape.

Anna Sofaer, president and founder of the Solstice Project is an American researcher and educator on the archeoastronomy of the Ancestral Puebloans of the American Southwest and other ancient cultures. In 1977, she "rediscovered" the astronomical marker site known as the Sun Dagger on Fajada Butte in Chaco Culture National Historic Park, which records the solar and lunar cycles.