The Use of Faunal Remains for Identifying Shifts in Pit Structure Function in the Mesa Verde Region: a Case Study From Goodman Point (open access)

The Use of Faunal Remains for Identifying Shifts in Pit Structure Function in the Mesa Verde Region: a Case Study From Goodman Point

The archaeofaunal remains left by the Ancestral Puebloan people of Goodman Point Unit provides a valuable, yet underutilized resource into pit structure function. This thesis explores temporal changes in pit structure use and evaluates if a final feast occurred during a kiva decommissioning. The results from zooarchaeological analyses of a pithouse and two great kivas suggest that changes in pit structures at Goodman Point mimic the regional trend toward specialization until late Pueblo III. Cross-cultural studies on feasts, southwest ethnographies and previous zooarchaeological work established methods for identifying a feast. The analysis of differences in faunal remains from a great kiva and multiple room block middens imply that the remains in the kiva were from a final feast prior to a decommissioning ceremony and were not fill. Spatially and temporally the great kiva appears to be a unique, specialized structure in the cultural development of the Goodman Point community.
Date: August 2015
Creator: Winstead, Christy
System: The UNT Digital Library