News From The Field

April 30, 2009

Sierra Canyon middle school students open the 2009 field season. Here, they begin excavations at Lightning Terrace, using trowels, whisk brooms, and buckets to remove dirt from test units in a midden, or refuse area.

Every bucket of dirt is carefully screened for artifacts. Here, archaeologist Steve Copeland demonstrates proper screening technique to Sierra Canyon students working at Lightning Terrace.

William Volf of the National Resources Conservation Service (left) and Steve Copeland conduct remote-sensing operations in a possible ancient agricultural field west of Goodman Point Pueblo.

This month Steve Copeland and I finished preparations for the 2009 field season by setting in new excavation units, cleaning and organizing field equipment, finishing up excavation units from last year, and conducting some remote sensing.  The final week of April, we were excited to welcome the first participant excavators of the season—a group of middle school students from Sierra Canyon School, located in Chatsworth, California. Just one week into the field season, we are already finding clues that will help us interpret the two sites where excavations have begun.

Most of the Sierra Canyon students excavated at Lightning Terrace, where test units were started in one midden area and along the exterior faces of the north walls of three roomblocks. Other students began work in a kiva at Thunder Knoll, where we plan to start many additional excavation units in the weeks ahead. So far, the artifacts found at both sites suggest primary occupations dating from the Pueblo III period, in addition to less well defined Pueblo II uses of the sites. Ongoing excavations should help us narrow our dating estimates for when Lightning Terrace and Thunder Knoll were used, occupied, and depopulated—and will shed light on how they fit into the larger occupation of the Goodman Point Unit.

This month we also finished some remote-sensing transects with the help of William Volf of the National Resources Conservation Service (see News From the Field, August 31, 2008). We used an RM-15 electricity-resistance meter to look for evidence of physical modification in areas that may have been agricultural fields. Though the data from this work are still being processed, we hope to identify possible agricultural and landscape features located away from habitation sites. Our plan is to test some of these features, with the ultimate goal of providing insight into Pueblo use of the larger landscape through time.

The weeks ahead promise to be informative and fun in the field. We’ll continue working in the western part of the unit, testing small habitation sites that appear to predate the large, late-A.D.-1200s village of Goodman Point Pueblo. In fact, many of the sites we will be working on this season were likely part of the larger and earlier Shields community, which is centered north of the Goodman Point Unit. Excavations in May should help us estimate more precisely the population size of Shields Pueblo and give us new insight into how settlement patterning in the Goodman Point Unit changed through time. So come join us and help explore this rich cultural landscape!   

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