News From The Field

June 30, 2008

In June, Crow Canyon started excavations at the Harlan Great Kiva site in the Goodman Point Unit of Hovenweep National Monument. The great kiva is an example of what archaeologists call "public architecture"—that is, places where members of the community would have congregated for special events, such as ceremonies or public meetings.

Participants in Crow Canyon's Adult Research Week get ready to excavate in the Harlan great kiva.

A few hours later, they're making progress!

Excavations in the midden associated with the great kiva have yielded a variety of artifacts, including Pueblo II pottery sherds.

In the four weeks since excavations began in this structure, we have uncovered an outer masonry wall, as well as internal architectural features, including a possible masonry column. The roof of the structure appears to have burned, allowing us to collect wood samples for tree-ring dating, which should help us date the construction of the structure and lead to a better understanding of how community organization may have changed through time at Goodman Point. We greatly appreciate the efforts of participants in Crow Canyon's adult research programs, who have done virtually all of the excavation in the great kiva.

We also conducted excavations in the midden, or refuse area, associated with the great kiva. The presence of particular styles of Pueblo II pottery in these deposits suggests that the great kiva was constructed and used during the tenth or early eleventh centuries, which archaeologists have long known was a time of intensive regional interaction, influenced heavily by developments in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico.

Finally, this past month, participants in Crow Canyon programs conducted test excavations at a small site near the Harlan Great Kiva site, called Bluebird House. The small pueblo is being tested using "stratified random sampling." This strategy involves dividing a site into "sampling strata" that correspond to different architectural and nonarchitectural areas of the site (for example, roomblock, kiva, and midden) and then excavating randomly selected 1-x-1-m units within each sampling stratum. The goal is to obtain a representative sample of materials and generate data that are directly comparable to data generated during Crow Canyon's Site Testing Program, which employed a similar sampling strategy. Ultimately, we hope to use these data to calculate artifact accumulation rates, estimate the number of people who lived at Bluebird House, and determine when the pueblo was built and occupied—all important information relating to the Pueblo II community development at Goodman Point.

As July approaches, we are preparing to move to other sites in the Goodman Point Unit, where we will work with participants in Crow Canyon's adult research programs, family archaeology week, high school field school, and high school archaeology camp to further our knowledge of ancient communities during the Pueblo II and III time periods.

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