News From The Field

June 28, 2007

Field staff, June 2007.

Since our May update, the Goodman Point Project has benefitted from the digging efforts of two groups of adults, students from four different middle schools, and one group of high school students. Our third intern of the 2007 field season, Lance Holly, has arrived; he brings impressive field skills and has great rapport with the students. Also, the field staff has been fortunate in enlisting seasonal assistance from longtime Southwestern archaeologist Leslie Sesler, whose considerable field experience is being used to ease the documentation backlog at the site. With her help, we may even be able to close down the site before the snow flies this year!

	Leslie Sesler documents masonry wall.

Digging is progressing well in our main areas of focus—Blocks 600, 1200, and 1300 (see the site map from May). We’ve collected numerous additional tree-ring samples; most are charred beams from kivas, but some are unburned roofing timbers that were protruding from the modern ground surface. Although the unburned beams are probably not datable, we’ll submit them to the tree-ring lab just in case.

Several roomblock walls have recently been exposed. Twenty vertical courses of the north wall of Block 700 (the D-shaped bi-wall block) are now visible, even though the bottom course still has not been revealed. I’ll report our final estimate of the original height of this structure in a future update after we reach bedrock and I can add the volume of rubble removed from the excavation unit to the height of the preserved portion of the wall.

	Participant in Adult Research Week exposes roomblock wall in Block 1300.

The field staff was quite surprised by a new development in Block 600. The unanticipated presence of a curved wall in the midden prompted us to set in an exploratory unit southwest of the westernmost kiva to further define the architecture. A different wall was encountered in this new unit. The positioning of these two newly discovered walls indicates that the west kiva in this block (see site map) is at least partly encircled by an arc of contiguous rooms. In other words, we’ve defined yet another bi-wall structure (Blocks 700, 1100, and 1200 also contain bi-wall buildings). Understanding the importance of this architectural layout will be a challenge, but the location of these four bi-wall structures around the canyon head and near the center of the village might have been significant.

	Black-on-white pottery sherds from Block 600.

The refuse in this area of the site is also of interest. Some of the pottery from Block 600 may prove to be a little out of the ordinary, and a small effigy from the nearby midden in Block 400 appears to be a duck fashioned from sandstone. We’ll soon add some additional test pits in the refuse of these blocks to ensure that we have an adequate sample of artifacts with which to compare the refuse from other architectural blocks in the village that were clearly used for ordinary residential purposes (see the project research design).

	Stone duck effigy from  Block 400.

The weather at the site is now typical of June—clear skies and hot afternoons. It’s the time of year when the passing of a cloud in front of the sun generates great excitement among staff and participants alike, and the “chilly downpour” I mentioned in the May update is but a distant memory! Not to worry, though, the monsoon season is on the way. . . .

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