Lab News

Faunal Remains Analysis Yields Intriguing Results

Faunal Results from Goodman Point Pueblo Featured in SAA Poster

by Kristin A. Kuckelman, Senior Research Archaeologist

May 28 , 2010

Graduate student intern Amy Hoffman and faunal consultant Steve Wolverton analyze turkey bones.

Intriguing results have begun to emerge from the analysis of faunal remains collected during Crow Canyon's excavations at Goodman Point Pueblo, conducted from 2005 through 2008. Amy Hoffman, a master's student at the University of North Texas, began analyzing the associated faunal remains in May 2009 under the supervision of Drs. Steve Wolverton and Lisa Nagaoka. Preliminary results were presented in a poster session last month at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in St. Louis.

This past March, with faunal identification 80 percent complete, I collaborated with the analysis team to produce the poster that compared the faunal remains from Goodman Point Pueblo and Sand Canyon Pueblo. Specifically, our goal was to learn whether the Goodman Point assemblage, like the Sand Canyon remains, contained evidence that the residents of these pueblos—which were probably the two largest villages in the region between A.D. 1260 and 1280—had suffered dietary stress just before regional depopulation. We titled the poster "Dietary Use of Animal Resources Prior to the Pueblo III Depopulation of the Mesa Verde Region."

Turkey bones examined in the Crow Canyon lab.

To conduct our study, Hoffman sent me the bone identification results to date, and I queried the database using the same procedure that I had used to query the Sand Canyon data during previous research. The concept was simple: I inferred that bones found in formal middens and other intentionally deposited refuse reflected animals consumed during most of the occupation of the settlement, and that bones left on structure floors, on structure roofs, and in hearths resulted from animals eaten during the final meals. The results from both pueblos indicate that, during most of the time the villages were occupied, the primary source of animal protein was domesticated turkey flocks, whereas the residents' diet just before regional depopulation included few turkeys but an unusually wide variety of wild animals, including carnivores and other nonpreferred animals.

Analytic results for the plant remains from Goodman Point Pueblo will be needed to ascertain whether, as at Sand Canyon Pueblo, the vegetal portion of the diet at Goodman Point shifted dramatically from domesticated crops to wild plants just before regional depopulation. If so, it will substantiate the findings for Sand Canyon, which were the first empirical results to indicate that the drought conditions that descended on the Mesa Verde region in about A.D. 1276 did, in fact, cause severe subsistence stress and forced these farming communities to briefly adopt a largely hunting-and-gathering subsistence strategy before ultimately migrating from the region.