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.

Snowmelt is one of the major sources of surface water supply and ground-water recharge in high elevation areas and can also cause flooding in snow dominated watersheds. Direct estimation of daily snowmelt requires daily snow water equivalent (SWE) measurements that are not always available, especially in places without monitoring stations. There are two alternative approaches to modeling snowmelt without using direct measurements of SWE, temperature-based and energy-based models. Due to its simplicity, computational efficiency, and less input data requirement, the temperature-based method is commonly used than the energy-based method. In the temperature-index approach snowmelt is estimated as a linear function of average air temperature, and the slope of the linear function is called the degree-day factor (DDF). Hence, the DDF is an essential parameter for utilizing the temperature-based method to estimate snowmelt. Thereby, to analyze the spatial properties of DDF, 10 years DDF from the entire state of Colorado was calculated for this research. Likewise, to study the temporal properties, DDFs for 27 years from the White Yampa water basin and the Colorado Headwaters water basin were calculated. As a part of the spatial analysis, the calculated DDFs were correlated with spatial variables (slope, aspect, latitude and elevation) and a …