News From The Field

May 31, 2008

In May, we started Phase II of the Goodman Point Archaeological Project at Lupine Ridge, one of the small habitation sites outside the large village of Goodman Point Pueblo (see map). A group of middle school students from Hayden, Colorado, helped us launch the 2008 dig season, and almost as soon as they began excavations, new and interesting details about life at the Goodman Point Unit began to emerge.

Test excavation in a room at Lupine Ridge. The rock alignment at the north edge of the excavation unit is the bottom course of a dismantled wall.

On just the second day of fieldwork, excavators uncovered the remains of a room that had been dismantled in ancient times. The room is located in a masonry roomblock, but almost no wall stones or roofing materials are visible in the stratigraphic profile, indicating that the building stone and other structural elements had been removed after the room was vacated. Why was the room dismantled? Most likely, the materials were salvaged for use in some other construction, either at this same pueblo or at a nearby site, possibly Goodman Point Pueblo itself. This example of ancient recycling will contribute greatly to our understanding of, not just site chronology, but changes in settlement patterns through time in the Goodman Point community as a whole. One of the goals of the Phase II test excavations is to estimate how many people may have lived in the area immediately around Goodman Point Pueblo before the latter was established in the middle to late A.D. 1200s. 

Middle school student holding a stone biface found on the first day of excavation.

Also in May, program participants excavated in several midden (trash) units associated with the roomblock. They recovered a variety of artifacts, including pottery, chipped-stone debitage, ground-stone fragments, animal bone, and several biface fragments. To date, three midden units have been completed, and excavations in several more are nearing completion. The types of pottery recovered from the midden will help us date the occupation of Lupine Ridge, which in turn will allow us to estimate when the room mentioned above was dismantled. Reconstructing these events will be critical to our understanding of construction sequence, architectural development, and community organizational change at the Goodman Point Unit.

As we wrap up our first month of the season, we want to say "thanks" to all the student excavators—a total of 133 by month's end—for helping us open the second phase of our investigation at the Goodman Point Unit. We've made such great progress that we will soon be shifting our focus to other sites in the Unit, including the isolated great kiva. It's shaping up to be a fast-paced summer, one that by season's end promises to yield important clues to thirteenth-century Pueblo life in the Mesa Verde region.

Grant Coffey, Supervisory Archaeologist, Director of Goodman Point Archaeological Project Phase II