News From The Field

November 21, 2005—Final Update for the Year!
On November 21, the 2005 field season at Goodman Point Pueblo officially ended—and what a season it was! From the creation of the site map in April until the backfilling of completed excavation units in November, it was a very busy and productive inaugural field season. Research in 2005 included work in a total of 78 excavation units within nine architectural blocks. More than 700 excavators, from middle school age through senior citizens, both novices and alums, contributed to our efforts to learn about this large, important, and fascinating ancestral Pueblo village.

Although the results of artifact, flotation, and tree-ring analyses will not be available for some time yet, our field observations have told us a great deal about Goodman Point Pueblo and the surrounding community. Some of our initial and preliminary interpretations about the village can be summarized as follows:

• The predominance of Mesa Verde Black-on-white pottery, the presence of this type of pottery in deposits that rest on bedrock, and of the McElmo-style, pecked-block masonry walls indicate that the village was constructed and occupied in the mid-to-late A.D.1200s.
  
  
• The presence of at least 107 kivas at the site suggests that between 500 and 750 people lived in the village during its heyday.
  
  
• Shallow middens and the lack of refuse in the fills of structures suggest that the village was occupied for a relatively short period of time.
  
  
• Most structures rest on bedrock. Kivas were built from bedrock upward; some were constructed within a rectangular masonry structure, others were supported by heavy berms around their peripheries.
  
  
• Masonry walls enclosed the village and were massively built and at least one story tall. In most areas of the village, these walls stretched from the end of one roomblock to the end of the next nearest block and were constructed after those blocks were built. However, evidence indicates that the long wall that enclosed the east edge of the village was built before the adjacent roomblocks, and that residences were constructed against the interior face of the wall, a situation similar to that at Sand Canyon Pueblo. Interestingly, one large structure in Block 1000 (an architectural block at the extreme southeast edge of the village) was built against the outside face of this wall, and is the only structure at the site known to have been so positioned. The characteristics of the village-enclosing walls in general suggest that they were constructed to serve as physical and visual barriers and were not merely symbolic boundary markers.
  
  
• There were more special-use structures in the village than we recognized during initial mapping of the site. For example, in Block 1100, excavators exposed part of a bi-wall structure (a row of roughly rectangular rooms encircling a central structure). Bi-wall structures that have been tested at other sites do not appear to have been ordinary residences. Excavation of the bi-wall structure in Block 1100 is still in progress, and an untested building that we think is an additional bi-wall structure is located west of the great kiva in Block 1200.
  
  
• Many structures in the village were two stories tall, which we calculate by adding the height of preserved walls to the volume of rubble removed from inside the structures during excavation. With this new information in hand, it is nearly certain that Block 700 was at least three stories tall . . . we'll work in this block during the 2006 field season.
  
  
• Several walls of unburned rooms contain building blocks that are fire-reddened, even though none of the other stones in those walls are reddened. This indicates that the reddened stones were in a wall of an earlier structure prior to their use in the walls in which they were found. Because Goodman Point Pueblo was occupied for such a short time, these earlier structures were most likely part of earlier habitations such as the small farmsteads found in the Goodman Point community. If roof beams were reused as well, tree-ring dates from the village might shed light on the time of construction of those same earlier farmsteads.
  
  
• Artifacts found so far at the site include an array of items typical of a residential village: lots of corrugated and black-on-white pottery; many manos and metates; bones of turkeys and other animals; projectile points and other flaked stone tools; single-bitted axes, mauls, cores, hammerstones, and peckingstones; a marine shell ornament and a few pendants; a large elk or deer antler; and a siltstone palette.
  
  
• Some of the events and circumstances associated with the abandonment of this village might have been similar to those at Sand Canyon and Castle Rock Pueblos, which is not surprising, because all three villages appear to have been abandoned during the widespread depopulation of the region in the late A.D. 1200s.

A more comprehensive annual report on the 2005 field season at Goodman Point Pueblo is being prepared and will be available online early in 2006.

A heartfelt thanks to all who participated in our programs in 2005—we couldn't have made this great progress without you! By the way, next year at the site promises to be even more interesting . . . .

Kristin Kuckelman, Senior Research Archaeologist, Project Director, Goodman Point Pueblo Excavation