News From The Field

August 21, 2006
We continue to build on our knowledge of Goodman Point Pueblo. Since the last diary entry, numerous groups have participated in our excavations: high school and middle school students, family groups, teachers, and novice and alum adults. With the help of these folks, excavations in structures and middens have moved along nicely in the past two months. Also in the interim, field interns Alison Bredthauer and Chelsea Kuiper completed their internships (thanks Alison and Chelsea!), and Laura Richardson and Emily Cubbon have moved into those positions. Sarena Morris completes her internship at the end of this week. Our interns are a tremendous help to us in the field.

As for new developments—perhaps most importantly, we’ve collected dozens of additional tree-ring samples. These new samples have come from seven kivas (in Blocks 500, 600, 800, 1000, 1100, and 1200), and they increase our confidence that, when we receive the dates from these samples, we’ll be able to determine when the village was founded and create a detailed construction history of the village. Many other studies and inferences about the pueblo will hinge on this history.

We have also updated our site map. The most recent version shows many new excavation units, especially in Blocks 400, 600, 700, 1100, and 1200. The 1-x-1-m units south of Block 400 contain a surprising amount of refuse, and overall, our midden excavations this season are yielding a much greater abundance of discarded material. The refuse areas we’re excavating this season are nearer the canyon rim, and we suspect that the greater depth of these middens is a result of longer occupation in this part of the village.

Among the more interesting artifacts found in the middens are numerous projectile points (including some Archaic points), a perforated bone tube ornament, bowl sherds with a flute-player image, pendants, bone beads, bone awls, a crescent-shaped stone eccentric, a fragmentary stone knife blade, and of course many vessel handles, peckingstones, ground-stone tools, turkey bones, burned corncobs, and eggshell fragments.

An exploratory unit in the south-central portion of Block 1100 has resulted in an addition to our kiva count. We now believe that there were 108 kivas (plus the great kiva) in the village. We placed the exploratory unit in an area of Block 1100 that had an ambiguous surface signature, which means that we couldn’t tell what was beneath the modern ground surface (room? refuse? rubble? kiva?). The question was quickly answered when a pilaster and a section of upper lining wall was exposed near the west end of the 1-x-2-m unit.

The field staff recently made a surprising, if tentative, observation in Block 700. As we were deciding where to place a north wall unit, a room unit, and a kiva unit to sample this block, we realized that the north half or two-thirds of the block appeared to be in a D-shaped, bi-wall layout with three kivas in the interior. The curved wall of the “D” is on the west, north, and east sides, the flat side is to the south (and is exposed in an old looter’s pit), and the easternmost kiva in the interior appears to be oversized, although not nearly large enough in diameter to be a great kiva. If this is indeed a bi-wall structure, it will be the third at the site. The first to be detected is just west of the great kiva in Block 1200, the second is near the middle of Block 1100. The locations of these structures are intriguing—they encircle the spring.

And lastly—the field crew has dedicated a great deal of time to clearing floors and completing documentation in Block 100, especially in Room 105 and Kiva 107. More than 70 artifacts were meticulously mapped and collected from the floor of this room. This material, along with results of special samples taken from the floor, should teach us about how these multistory structures were used. Most of the work in Kiva 107 has focused on defining, excavating, and documenting the original hearth and the two remodeled versions of the hearth. During one of the remodeling episodes, finger impressions were left in the moist adobe that formed the upper wall of the feature. These finger impressions are quite slender, which suggests that they were made by either a woman or a subadult. I favor the former theory and can almost picture the woman of the house remodeling her hearth to suit her cooking needs. Little did the owner of those fingers know that more than 700 years after the construction of that hearth wall, the impressions would spark the imagination of many fascinated non-Pueblo people. I’ll leave you to ponder the incredible endurance of such fragile remains.

I hear that our alum-only weeks at the end of the season are already full, but there are still openings in other weeks before then. Come help us learn more about the folks who built and lived in this interesting village!

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