Sept. 21st
 
[Chelsea]
Weather: Cloudy/rainy, humid, temperature in upper 70's and low 80's
Working times: 8:00 am -12:00 pm ' typing up site reports and IF forms in the lab
12:30- 3:30 pm ' site tour at Goodman Point Pueblo

[Tucker]
Lab day today, were able to finish LT 4 [5MT 17273] site form and got the 2-track mapped on the quad [map] after I figured out how to get its UTM's off the GPS.

We went out to Goodman Point and got a really neat site tour of where they [Crow Canyon Archaeological Center] are digging.

Saw/heard a lot of interesting things.

A: Bi-walled structure: Goodman Point and surrounding region bi-walls have kivas in middle and are surrounded by roomblocks sometimes 2 stories high.
Chaco tri-walls nothing is in the center circle and concentric circles with divisions are empty.

B: Kristin [Kuckelman] (head archaeologists @ Goodman pt.) is a firm believer in the idea that kivas were also main habitation places. 95% of hearths found in these late PIII sites are in kivas. 1 kiva for 3 rooms. Chaco, 1 kiva for 15 rooms. A shift happened somewhere…sometime.
Hearths in kivas by PIII b/c wood resources are limited and kivas being subterranean held heat better.
Drought made winter colder? Need to consolidate and have better insulation?

C: Towers, an arbitrary term?
There are an abundance of tower placements and styles throughout the SW. Several People have mentioned and I agree, that we need to move past the "that is a tower" phase and type these towers based on placement on the landscape. Because it seems that towers served different functions based on where they were located.
If we could record and find the patterns of where they placed towers we could break away from calling everything that is taller than it is wide a tower and call it something more applicable to its possible use which we may be able to extrapolate from its location.


[Chelsea]
At 12:30pm we went to Goodman Point Pueblo and got a site tour of this late Pueblo II - late Pueblo III 143 acre pueblo. While the site is labeled as a late PII - late PII pueblo it does have some ground surface sites that are early than PII. The site is contemporary with the Castle Rock and Sand Canyon sites. Goodman Point is one of two communities that was present in the Sand Canyon locality in ancient times, the other community being Sand Canyon. Goodman Point Pueblo has the potential to reveal unique and significant information regarding settlement patterning as the landscape is unmolested (preserved through the federal government). The landscape has the potential of exposing ancient paths and roads.

There are approximately 107 kivas in addition to the great kiva. As it is estimated that 5-7 people used each kiva, the population of the site has been estimated at 580-700 people. The site is generally the same size and time as Sand Canyon Pueblo (1250-1280 AD) with a very late and short occupation of the site. While Sand Canyon has evidence of buildings going out of use and being used as secondary refuse, Goodman Point does not have such evidence, further indication of the sites short life.

The location of Goodman Point is ideal in terms of water resources as it was founded at the head of a canyon, situated next to a large spring. This type of site placement is reminiscent of the towers of Hovenweep, which are generally from a contemporaneous time-period, and are situated at canyon heads in the vicinity of a water source. This type of position enables easier access to the water source in addition to its control. Our tour guide Kristin pointed out that the people living in Goodman Point Pueblo would have an intimate knowledge of their spring as they would depend on it for their survival in many forms (water crops, drink, mortar for construction, etc). Roomblock 700, which was originally three-stories, would have been the tallest structure at the pueblo and is situated near the spring with the drainage running into it. A structure along this canyon rim would be prime real-estate as it is next to the water source. On the opposite side of the drainage is a similar tower-like structure, although our tour guide Kristin sees "tower" as being an extremely loaded term as it implies a set of expectations but we do not know what these two structures were used for or if they were used for the same function. The structures are at the bottom of a drainage instead of being up high so there is a semantic problem in suggesting they were used primarily as line-of-sight devices with other towers (according to Kristen). However, maybe the elevated nature of the "tower" was meant to have symbolic impact, an emphasis of the person's power or special political/social status-amplified by the fact that the person(s) who inhabited the structures were situated next to such a vital resource.

The burned timbers from kivas on the site will…prove invaluable in telling us when the latest and earliest kivas were built, and potentially the direction in which the village was built through the implementation of tree-ring dating. If small farmsteads were dismantled and the wood was brought to Goodman Point Pueblo for its construction (the beams would predate the late PII - late PIII occupation of Goodman Point Pueblo).

[Becky]
Goodman Point:
-discussion about terminology
-we have one word for towers
  -are they really all the same?
  -did different locations/purposes define different structures that just looked similar?
-same for kivas
  -some seem more ceremonial, some more practical
  -did they think of them in the same way?
  -some are 1/5-6 ppl., some are 1/10-15 ppl
  -are they different structures or just one structure that changes over time?
-selection of digging sites
  -how to hit the exciting things [for the paying Crow Canyon visitors!]
  -south ends of kivas, north walls
  -sampling for burned soils, burned wood
  -randomly choosing sites in the midden (more statistical significance)
  -looking where walls join (which came 1st)
  -one room and one kiva in each roomblock, (helds age)
-layers in the midden
  -topsoil
  -rubble-from prehistoric times-helped support walls
  -midden-since it is trapped under the rubble it has been sealed since prehistoric times
  -bedrock

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