America the Beautiful® National Parks 5 Piece Quarter New Mexico

This set of 5 quarters commemorate America's national parks with unique reverse designs and a variety of finishes. In 2010, the United States Mint began a 56 quarter program featuring designs depicting national parks and other national sites as part of the United States Mint America the Beautiful Quarters Program. Quarters will be issued in the order that they were first established as a national site. The program expected to continue through 2022. Included are: Brilliant Uncirculated coins (1 each from P- and D-Mint) 24K gold plated coin (Random Mint) Colorized coin (Random Mint) Hologrammed coin (Random Mint)

The Chaco Culture National Historical Park quarter is the second of 2012 and the 12th overall in the America the Beautiful Quarters® Program. This historical park in New Mexico features Chaco Canyon, which was a major center of Puebloan culture between A.D. 850 and 1250. The Chacoan sites are part of the homeland of Pueblo Indian peoples of New Mexico, the Hopi Indians of Arizona and the Navajo Indians of the southwest. Chaco Canyon was the cultural center of a system of communities linked by road and trading networks across a 40,000 square-mile region in the Four Corners area from A.D. 850 to 1150. Chaco is remarkable for its multi-storied public buildings called “great houses,” enormous circular ceremonial subterranean structures called “great kivas,” and distinctive architecture featuring a notable concentration of petroglyphs and pictographs. The Chacoan people combined pre-planned architectural designs, astronomical alignments, geometry, landscaping and engineering to create an ancient urban center of spectacular public architecture. It was first established as a national site on March 11, 1907 (35 Stat. 2119).