scholarly journals A Prehistoric Caddo Site on Black Fork Creek, Upper Neches River Basin, Smith County, Texas

Author(s):  
Timothy K. Perttula ◽  
Bo Nelson

During the course of recent archaeological survey investigations for a proposed waterline, a previously unrecorded prehistoric Caddo site Lakewood Gardens (41SM425)-was found near, but outside the right-of-way and construction casement of, the proposed waterline. This article provides summary details about the site, hopefully adding information to the sparse archaeological record of prehistoric Caddo sites along Black Fork Creek. The site is situated on a natural upland rise (440 feet amsl) overlooking the Black Fork Creek floodplain less than 200 m to the north. Black Fork Creek is in the upper Neches River basin; the creek flows west into Prairie Creek, which enters the Neches River about 10 km to the west of the site. This area is in the Post Oak Savannah. Before the mid- to late 19th century, the swampy Black Fork Creek floodplain would have been covered with an oak-hickory forest, with more mesic hardwoods, including various oaks, maple, sweetgum, ash, and elm. The Post Oak Savanna vegetation would have been dominated by a variety of fire-tolerant oaks and hickory on upland landforms. The upland landforms in this part of Smith County area have Eocene-aged Queen Sparta, Tyler Greenstone Member, and Weches Formation interbedded deposits of sand and clays.

Author(s):  
Timothy K. Perttula

Site 41AN28 is an extensive ancestral Caddo settlement on an alluvial terrace on the west side of Mound Prairie Creek in the Post Oak Savannah of East Texas. Mound Prairie Creek is an southward- and eastward-flowing tributary to the Neches River. The confluence of the two streams lies about 20 km to the east. Directly to the east of 41AN28 on the east side of Mound Prairie Creek lies the Pace McDonald site (41AN51). This site is an important Middle Caddo period (ca. A.D. 1200-1400) mound center with at least two earthen mounds and a settlement that covers more than 11 acres. Both investigated mounds at Pace McDonald were built to cover and bury special purpose structures where significant deposits of ash were accumulated, probably ash temples like those uncovered in the main mound at the nearby A. C. Saunders site (41AN19). Two calibrated radiocarbon dates from habitation areas at the Pace McDonald site range from A.D. 1200-1410.


Author(s):  
Turner

This article analyzes the Bolton Collection of 1384 lithic artifacts, including dart and spear points from the Paleoindian through the Woodland periods. The analysis places the points in the sequence used by Perttula. The points are compared with those from the middle Sabine River basin counties as well as the analysis of the Archaic points of the Cypress Creek drainage basin. In addition, the Archaic and Woodland population density of Camp County based on the proportional frequency of projectile points of known age is compared with that of the middle Sabine River basin counties and the Cypress Basin. Additional comparisons are made with archaeological sites in the Post Oak Savanna to the north and west and in the Blackland Prairie to the west.


Author(s):  
Timothy K. Perttula

The De Rossett Farm and Quate Place sites were among the earliest East Texas archaeological sites to be investigated by professional archaeologists at The University of Texas (UT), which began under the direction of Dr. J. E. Pearce between 1918-1920. According to Pearce, UT began work in this part of the state under the auspices of the Bureau of American Ethnology, and that work “had led me to suppose that I should find this part of the State rich in archeological material of a high order.” The two sites were investigated in August 1920. They are on Cobb Creek, a small and eastward-flowing tributary to the Neches River, nor far to the northeast of the town of Frankston, Texas; the sites are across the valley from each other. The De Rossett Farm site is on an upland slope on the north side of the valley, while the Quate Place site is on an upland slope on the south side of the Cobb Creek valley, about 2 km west of the Neches River, and slightly southeast from the De Rossett Farm. Both sites have domestic Caddo archaeological deposits, and there was an ancestral Caddo cemetery of an unknown extent and character at the De Rossett Farm.


Author(s):  
Timothy K. Perttula ◽  
Mark Thaker

A review of early trinomial numbers for sites located in Smith County in East Texas indicated that between 1938 and 1943 Jack Hughes identified and collected from at least 37 sites listed on the Texas Historic Site Atlas. From 1938 to 1941 his site locations randomly occur throughout the County; interestingly there are no sites recorded in 1942. In 1943 he recorded about 14 sites along Black Fork Creek and its tributaries, this being mostly west of the City of Tyler. The primary purpose in reviewing the available archaeological information about these early recorded sites was to re-visit selected sites if necessary and to update information that was recorded beginning almost 80 years ago. An entry contained on a Texas Archeological Research Laboratory at The University of Texas (TARL) site card indicated that Hughes collected artifacts from a site (41SM32) located on Little Saline Creek, near the much better known Alligator Pond site (41SM442) that had been recorded in 2011 by Mark Walters. The Alligator Pond site is on property owned by Thacker, a Texas Archeological Stewardship Network member. 41SM32 is a prehistoric archaeological site that was found and recorded in September 1940 by Jack Hughes, who later went on to a career as a professional archaeologist in Texas. The site is on Little Saline Creek, a northward-flowing tributary to the Sabine River about 10 km to the north, in the Post Oak Savannah of East Texas.


1953 ◽  
Vol 8 (22) ◽  
pp. 444-457
Keyword(s):  
The West ◽  

Charles Edward Inglis was the second surviving son of Dr Alexander Inglis, M.D., M.R.C.S.E., of Auchindinny and Redhall, and of his first wife, Florence, the second daughter of John Frederick Feeney, proprietor of the Birmingham Daily Post, whose family founded the Feeney Art Gallery in that city. The Inglis family of Auchindinny appear first as tenants and afterwards owners of the farm of Langbyres, which adjoins the west side of Murdostoun in the parish of Shotts, Lanarkshire. The first mention of them in connexion with the place is found in the Lord High Treasurer’s accounts for 1543 when John Inglis in Langbyres and James Kneland in Swyntre had to pay £13 6s. 8d. to redeem their movable goods, which had been escheated as a penalty for their absence from the army, mustered by James V to invade England, which was routed at Solway Moss. The estate of Auchindinny, about 730 acres, was purchased in 1702 by one John Inglis, a Writer to the Signet, who had succeeded to Langbyres in 1685. Auchindinny lies about eight miles south of Edinburgh, on the right bank of the North Esk and at the south end of the parish of Lasswade. The house, completed in 1707, is a severe substantial sandstone building. John Inglis had eleven children. One of his grand-daughters, Barbara, co-heiress of Archibald, Laird of Auchindinny, married in 1777 her cousin, Captain, afterwards Admiral, John Inglis, R.N., of Redhall, whose father had left Scotland and settled in Philadelphia as a merchant about 1736. Captain Inglis commanded H.M.S. Belliqueux at the battle of Camperdown. The ship took a conspicuous share in the fighting, there being a hundred and three casualties out of a complement of four hundred and ninety-one, and quite redeemed the character which she had lost in the Mutiny at the Nore a few months earlier. It is said that the Captain was puzzled in the battle by his Admiral’s frequent signals and at last threw his signal book on deck exclaiming, ‘Damn the signals; up wi’ the hellem and gang into the middle o’ it’. He thus anticipated Nelson’s celebrated memorandum that ‘when a captain should be at a loss he cannot do very wrong if he lay his ship alongside of the enemy’.


Worldview ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 4-6
Author(s):  
Gary L. Guertner

If a war broke out today, much of the combat in open spaces would have to take place in the West German national park system.—Paul Bracken, On Theater Warfare (The Hudson Institute, July 1, 1979)In the time of the Roman historian Tacitus (circa 55-117 A.D.), the area now watched over by NATO and Warsaw Pact armies was covered by a vast forest penetrated only by a network of narrow trails. A traveler could walk from Poland to the Rhine without even glimpsing the sun. As populations grew, forests gradually gave way to pastures and arable land. By the beginning of the twentieth century German geography—and military strategy—had undergone such radical transformation that Field Marshal von Schlieffen could see the North German Plain as a corridor for maneuvering thirty-four of the kaiser's divisions to outflank the French “if the last man on the right brushed the [English] Channel with his sleeve.”


Author(s):  
Timothy K. Perttula ◽  
Waldo Troell

The upper Neches River basin in East Texas has been the scene of archaeological research since the early 1900s, with a particular focus on the post-A.D. 1000 archaeological record of the Caddo peoples in the region. The A. S. Mann (41HE7) and M. S. Roberts (41HE8) sites are ancestral Caddo sites located in the modern-day Pineywoods that were investigated by University of Texas (UT) archaeologists in the 1930s. I want to thank Waldo Troell for bringing these sites to my attention.


Author(s):  
Timothy K. Perttula

The 13 ancestral Caddo sites and collections discussed in this article were recorded by G. E. Arnold of The University of Texas at Austin between January and April 1940 as part of a WPA-funded archaeological survey of East Texas. The sites are located along the lower reaches of Patroon, Palo Gaucho, and Housen bayous in Sabine County, Texas. These bayous are eastward-flowing tributaries to the Sabine River in the Toledo Bend Reservoir area, but only 41SB30 is located below the current Toledo Bend Reservoir flood pool. This is an area where the temporal, spatial, and social character of the Caddo archaeological record is not well known, despite the archaeological investigations of Caddo sites at Toledo Bend Reservoir in the 1960s-early 1970s, and in more recent years.


Author(s):  
Arlen F. Chase ◽  
Diane Z. Chase

How the ancient Maya used E Groups needs to be derived from the archaeological record. Research undertaken in the southeast Petén of Guatemala has revealed a concentration of over 150 E Groups in the area defined by Ceibal on the west, Caracol on the east, Esquipulas on the south, and the Central Petén lakes on the north. Excavated E Groups from Cenote, Uaxactún, Caracol, and Ixtonton can be used to help organize and understand these archaeological data and to show that the E Group structural assemblage is generally early within this region, dating primarily to the Late Preclassic Period (350 BCE-0 CE) and constituting the founding architecture for an unusual number of small communities in the southeast Petén. The size and structure of the eastern platform in these E Groups also appears to serve as a proxy for broader socio-political organization. Data from Caracol also suggests the importance of these architectural assemblages for temporal ritual associated with the 8th and 9th baktun cycles. Tenth cycle ritual use of these assemblages can also be seen at sites such as Ucanal, Seibal, and possibly Yaxha. Thus, E Groups can be linked to both the rise and denouement of Maya civilization.


Author(s):  
Timothy Perttula

The Bonner Place (41AG3) and J. A. Jordan (41AG5) sites are ancestral Caddo habitation sites recorded by Gus E. Arnold in November 1939 during his WPA-sponsored archaeological survey of East Texas. Both sites are in the Crawford Creek drainage; Crawford Creek is a westward-flowing tributary of the Neches River (Figure 1).


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