News From The Field

June 21, 2006
The second field season at Goodman Point Pueblo is well under way! Numerous groups of middle-school, high-school, and college students, as well as novice and alum adults, have participated in excavations during the first two months of the 2006 season, and the new information being gathered continually enriches our interpretations about this large, interesting village. The field staff—Grant Coffey, Steve Copeland, and me, plus interns Alison Bredthauer and Chelsea Kuiper—have been busy setting in new excavation units, supervising diggers, documenting stratigraphic profiles, and backfilling completed pits.

In the previous diary entry, I mentioned that finding and excavating additional midden deposits at the site was a high priority. So we’ve been focusing a good deal of attention on the refuse areas that we discovered using a soil probe earlier this spring. A midden we tested on the slope below Block 1000 contained much less cultural material than we had hoped, but the good news is that we were fortunate enough to select a structure in this block for testing that, it turns out, is filled with refuse. This is great luck, because fragile material such as animal bone and organic material preserves much better in a protected container such as a room than it does out on the ground surface where it’s exposed to animals and weather. This refuse will greatly bolster the size of our refuse assemblage from Block 1000. Here are bonus inferences: this is the first structure we’ve excavated at the site that contains refuse, which suggests that the village was occupied for such a short time that few structures stood long enough to have fallen into disuse and, additionally, that Block 1000 was constructed early in the history of the village.

We’ve also had good success sampling refuse in Blocks 1100 and 1200. Middens southwest, southeast, and northeast of Block 1100 have been much more extensive and contain significantly more artifacts than we dared to hope, particularly because this refuse was not visible on the modern ground surface. Refuse north and west of Block 1200 has likewise been more abundant than we expected—this refuse is especially important because it resulted from activities conducted in the great kiva and the bi-wall structure adjacent to that kiva. Of all structures in the village, these are the most likely to have been used for nonresidential purposes, and the contents of the refuse near these structures constitute the best clues to the nature of these nondomestic activities. Our initial impression is that refuse from these two blocks contains a greater abundance of items such as pendants, worked bone, pottery with unusual decoration, and unusual stone tools. Final interpretations are far down the road, however!

We have an important 2006 update on the infamous subterranean structure at the east end of Block 900. This structure has been referred to as the “clay kiva,” because the fill inside it has a very high clay content and has been extremely difficult to excavate. And even at a depth of approximately 4 ft below the modern ground surface, our excavation pit surprisingly revealed jumbled rubble but no intact masonry. For this reason, some excavators and observers challenged our assumption that it was a kiva and suggested that the pit might have been a cistern or some other unusual feature. Here’s the update: the top of a large, vertical deflector slab was recently exposed near the middle of the excavation pit! Soon after, just south of this slab, a short section of sort-of intact masonry bench face was also revealed. The moniker “clay kiva” is thus justified and has become permanent, and now that we’ve excavated into collapsed burned roofing material, it’s at least a little easier to dig!

Stay tuned for additional updates. We’re beginning to get into burned roofing debris in several new kivas and are anticipating lots of tree-ring samples again this season—the more the better!

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