ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESEARCH AT GOODMAN POINT PUEBLO AND THE DEPOPULATION OF THE MESA VERDE REGION, UTAH-COLORADO, USA RADOSŁAW PALONKA*, KRISTIN KUCKELMAN** * Institute of Archaeology, Jagiellonian University, Gołębia 11 Street, 31-007 Cracow, Poland. E-mail: radek.palonka@uj.edu.pl ** Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, 23390 Road K, Cortez, Colorado 81321, USA. E-mail: kkuckelman@crowcanyon.org Keywords: Mesa Verde, Goodman Point Pueblo, Pueblo culture, Archaeologists and Native Americans, American Southwest, Depopulation. Abstract Archaeological investigations conducted from 2005 to 2007 in Goodman Point Pueblo focused on ancient Pueblo culture in the Mesa Verde region on factors that stimulated migrations from the area at the end of thirteenth century A.D. This archaeological research 1 was conducted with cooperation between archaeologists and Native Americans, including descendants of ancient Pueblo people. This article briefly summarizes three seasons of archaeological research at Goodman Point Pueblo and sketches the final period of Pueblo settlement in the Mesa Verde region, a piece of the Pueblo past that has been pondered since the nineteenth century, when archaeological remains were first studied in the area. ANCIENT PUEBLO CULTURE IN THE MESA VERDE REGION The Mesa Verde region is a part of a larger area refferred to as the North American Southwest 2 (Fig. 1). Mesa Verde, considered as an archaeological term, includes adjacent parts of what it is present southeastern Utah, southwestern Colorado, northwestern New Mexico, and northeastern Arizona in the 1 Archaeological investigations at Goodman Point Pueblo were carried out by the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, Cortez, Colorado. The senior author of the article participated in that research in 2005 and 2006, principally as one of the supervisors of participants during the excavations. The article is an expanded and updated version of the article “Goodman Point Pueblo: Research on the Final Period of Settlement of the Ancestral Pueblo Indians in the Mesa Verde Region, Colorado, USA. The Preliminary Report, 2005–2006 Seasons” by Radosław Palonka and Kristin Kuckelman, submited for publication in “Recherches Archéologiques” in 2007. 2 Archaeologically, the Southwest includes today’s Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, southeastern Nevada, and western Texas in the United States and the northern portions of the states of Sonora and Chihuahua in Mexico.