A friend asked me to answer this question: What is the name of the building that an explorer found a well preserved room where "the stone walls still have their plaster upon them in a tolerable state of preservation."?, using the article: In the years following the Ancestral Puebloan's departure from Chaco Canyon, several migrations to the region occurred. During the 15th century, Navajo people emigrated to the area from northwestern Canada, and in the 18th century Spanish explorers and settlers came from the south. The Spanish investigated parts of the San Juan Basin, but there is no record of them ever finding Chaco Canyon. When cartographer Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco drew a map in 1774 of Spanish land holdings in the region, he labeled Chaco Canyon with the word Chaca, but it is unlikely he ever visited the area. In 1823 the governor of New Mexico, José Antonio Vizcarra, discovered ancient ruins in the canyon during a military campaign against the Navajo. Vizcarra's account is the first historical record of the Chacoan great houses that were "of such antiquity that their inhabitants were not known to Europeans". In 1844, Josiah Gregg made the first published reference to Chaco Canyon in his popular book, Commerce of the Prairies.
The United States started exploring the region following the Mexican–American War of 1846–48 and the acquisition of the New Mexico Territory. During a military campaign against the Navajo in 1849, Lieutenant James Simpson of the United States Army Corps of Engineers became interested in the canyon's ruins. A group led by the governor of Jemez Pueblo, Francisco Hosta, explored the canyon; its members included Simpson and the brothers Richard and Edward Kern, who were respectively an artist and a cartographer. Simpson was impressed by Chetro Ketl's masonry, which he described as "a combination of science and art which can only be referred to a higher stage of civilization and refinement than is discoverable in the works of Mexicans or Pueblos of the present day." Simpson and company documented their findings, noting the location and style of the great houses, taking measurements, and sketching the canyon's major ruins. They described the kivas as "circular apartments sunk in the ground". Simpson briefly explored..., what would be the answer ?



Chetro Ketl