Special thanks to Grant Coffey of the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center for his presentation on Goodman Point and what the research project was able to identify in a series of test digs over a seven-year period. The project lends a better understanding of what the area (within a 5km radius) may have looked like during the timeframe of 1000-1285 C.E.
Coffey shared a variety of new technologies that were unavailable during the Pueblo excavations and community surveys conducted throughout the mid-2000s that used new LDIR technology to illustrate the vast Ancestral Puebloan occupation of the site.
One remarkable takeaway for visitors, besides the incredible 3D and laser modeling that shows what the structures and communities may have looked like, was the speed and efficiency the US Government proceeded with in preserving the area in 1889. The site was identified as culturally and archeologically significant in August 1889 and then officially removed from the Desert Land Act and Homestead Act as being land no longer available for occupation and officially the US first archeological reserve by the middle of September 1889. Check out that rendering here:
The Goodman Point Archaeological Project was a multiyear investigation of an ancient Pueblo community conducted by Crow Canyon from 2005 to 2010. This clip displays the 3D rendering of Kiva 107.
Grant Coffey is an archaeologist and the research database manager at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Cortez, Colorado. He has done archaeological work in the northern Southwest for over twenty years, and he directed the second phase of Crow Canyon’s Goodman Point Archaeological Project. His presentations on Saturday, October 28th provided an overview of this seven-year archaeological field project and highlighted essential findings that add to our understanding of ancestral Pueblo life in southwest Colorado. Thanks to all who joined; the Museum hosted 70 visitors for the presentations on Saturday.
Goodman Point was named for Indian Creek and Moab cowboy, Henry Calvin Goodman, who first ran cattle there before settling on Indian Creek and would later run sheep there with his brother-in-law, Moab’s first mayor, Harry Green. Goodman Point was the first piece of land in America preserved for its value in cultural resources when in 1889 it was removed from the lands that could be acquired through the Homestead and Desert Land Acts, and specifically set aside as an Archaeological Reserve as the first federal action to protect such sites in US history.
