Lab News

Lab Completes Important Analyses

by Jonathan Till, Lab Analysis Manager
September 27, 2006

The Crow Canyon Archaeological Center laboratory has been very busy this summer. In addition to processing and analyzing artifacts from our current excavation at Goodman Point Pueblo, we have recently completed several other analysis projects.

Albert Porter Pueblo Chipped-Stone Analysis

The lab has just finished analyzing the chipped-stone debitage from Albert Porter Pueblo, the field project that preceded our work at Goodman Point Pueblo. This lithic assemblage is the largest, by far, to be analyzed by Crow Canyon. More than 70,000 flakes—totaling well over 800 pounds of rock—were examined. Critical to the completion of this analysis were the tireless and steady efforts of our lab volunteers. Archaeologists will now be able to use these data to address important research questions regarding trade, social organization, and the degree of Chacoan influence at Albert Porter Pueblo during the eleventh and twelfth centuries A.D.

Champagne Springs and Hawkins Preserve Analyses

During the spring and summer of 2006, Crow Canyon lab staff and program participants examined two very interesting artifact assemblages from Mesa Verde–region sites that were investigated by other organizations. Nearly 9,000 pottery sherds from the Champagne Springs Site Group were washed, cataloged, and then analyzed. The “site group” actually consists of two contiguous sites that are located near the Colorado-Utah state line just south of Dove Creek, Colorado, and they appear to date from the middle to late A.D. 900s. The site group, which includes a great kiva and a possible prehistoric road, is being investigated by Don Dove, with the help of the Hisatsinom Chapter of the Colorado Archaeological Society. Sites of this time period are quite rare in southwestern Colorado, so the analysis of the pottery from the Champagne Springs Site Group is critical to the development of a comprehensive pottery chronology for the Mesa Verde region.

The second artifact collection comes from a Pueblo II site at the Hawkins Preserve, a 120-acre preserve managed by the Cortez Cultural Center. The artifacts were collected about 10 years ago, but were never analyzed. Working with archaeologist Dale Davidson, Crow Canyon lab staff and program participants washed and cataloged the artifacts and analyzed the pottery and chipped-stone assemblages. More than 3,500 pottery sherds and nearly 1,000 stone flakes were analyzed from this collection, resulting in data that will help us better understand community development in the years leading up to the Pueblo III period, the final period of ancestral Pueblo occupation in the Mesa Verde region.