News From The Field

October 26, 2006
The 2006 participant digging season ended on October 6. Lots of Crow Canyon alumni turned out to help us during the final two weeks of the season—thanks to all of you for your assistance and dedication! Later in the month, research staff members toured the site with a group of faithful supporters who had come to Crow Canyon to attend our annual meeting. We hope they enjoyed the afternoon (despite the rain), and we appreciate their interest in our research at Goodman Point. The field crew will continue to work at the site until November 17—we have a great deal of documentation and backfilling to do before winterizing the site.

The alum diggers helped us make significant progress in Block 700, the D-shaped bi-wall structure on the canyon rim. The presence of this structure at Goodman Point Pueblo and its similarity to Block 1500 at Sand Canyon Pueblo have generated a lot of excitement among Crow Canyon staff and supporters. What we learn from our excavations in this block should help us address some of the questions we’ve posed in our project research design. Excavations in Room 709, a bi-wall room in the curved, northern part of the “D,” have progressed well. An enormous amount of collapsed wall debris, two rotted roof beams, and a moderate number of pottery sherds, stone flakes, and animal bones have been removed from this room. We are still quite high in the fill—nowhere near the floor of the lowermost story. Excavations along the outside face of the north wall of this block have exposed 1.5 vertical meters of wall face thus far (we haven’t reached bedrock yet), and more than 1 cubic meter of building stones has been removed from the excavation pit. Rough calculations indicate that this wall was originally at least 3.5 meters (11.5 feet) tall—probably three stories. We were also lucky enough to hit a considerable amount of refuse in four midden units at the southwest edge of the block.

Block 700 has yielded another surprise as well. The type of structure concealed by the circular rubble mound west of the main architectural block—tentatively identified as a tower during site mapping in 2005—has finally been identified! Traditionally, isolated circular rubble mounds have been interpreted as towers during archaeological surveys. After careful excavation, however, it is now clear that the structure in Block 700 is an isolated kiva contained within a circular masonry structure resting directly on bedrock (exposed along the east edge of the main drainage that cuts through the center of the village). In our 1-x-2-m excavation unit, we found several features that provide incontrovertible evidence that the structure is a kiva: a masonry bench face, a hearth and vertical-slab deflector set into a constructed floor, and the west edge of a ventilator-tunnel opening. In addition, in the west profile face of the excavation unit, we observed two vertical slabs that are perpendicular to each other and that appear to be part of a bin that is mostly outside the unit to the west.

The discovery that this structure is actually a kiva strengthens our suspicion that a similar structure tested last year on the opposite side of the drainage (in Block 1100) is also an isolated kiva inside an enclosing structure (we found fewer features in the tested portion of that structure, which made it difficult for us to positively identify structure type). So what do we make of these two buildings, which appear to be almost mirror images of each other? The fact that both kivas are isolated—that is, they are detached from the main architecture of the blocks in which they are located—is probably significant, and we believe that the kivas were probably not ordinary residential structures. Artifacts on the floor and in the collapsed roofing material of the Block 700 kiva—including several reconstructible vessels and two manos—should help us infer how such structures were used. Regardless of the conclusions we eventually draw about structure function, however, the recognition that isolated circular rubble mounds can indicate the presence of kivas instead of towers is a very important development—one that should lead to more careful inferences regarding structure type by archaeologists surveying canyon-rim sites.

So ends another season at Goodman Point Pueblo. We learned a great deal about this village during 2006, and we collected an enormous quantity of artifacts and ecofacts that will allow us to generate data crucial to our understanding of this community and of ancestral Pueblo life just before the Mesa Verde region was depopulated in the late A.D. 1200s.

A heartfelt thanks to all of the 670 excavators who worked at the site this season—we couldn’t conduct our research without you! The 2007 field season promises to be the most interesting yet and will include excavations in the great kiva and its associated midden, in the as-yet-untested Block 1300, and in the D-shaped bi-wall block. We hope that many of you can come to Crow Canyon and be a part of this fascinating and worthwhile research!

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