scholarly journals Three Mounds Creek Site, Gregg County, Texas

Author(s):  
Timothy K. Perttula

One of the prehistoric Caddo sites represented in the Buddy Calvin Jones Collections at the Gregg County Historical Museum (GCHM) is the Three Mounds Creek site in Gregg County, in East Texas. The site is GC-68 in the Jones site numbering system (68th site he discovered in Gregg County). The available information about the site in the GCHM records is sketchy at best. The site had three mounds along Spring Creek, near its confluence with the Sabine River, in the Longview area. A search of Gregg County 7.5' USGS topographic quadrangles failed to disclose a Spring Creek in the Sabine River basin, so it is likely that the Spring Creek appellation is an informal one used by Jones at the time. Jones' notes also fail to describe the mounds in any fashion, nor their relationship to each other or the landform they were built on, and no map is available that shows the location of the three mounds with respect to where he collected artifacts from the site.

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

In February 1957, Sam Whiteside of Smith County, Texas, excavated a burial at 41SM53. This site was designated P-4 in Mr. Whiteside’s notes and it was one of several Caddo sites along Prairie Creek in the upper Sabine River basin that he investigated to varying degrees in the 1950s and 1960s. As an a vocational archeologist Mr. Whiteside made many important contributions to East Texas archeology. Dr. Dee Ann Story, of the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory at The University of Texas at Austin, who corresponded with Mr. Whiteside, later obtained the trinomial 41SM53 for the site.


Author(s):  
Timothy K. Perttula

The A. C. Gibson site (41WD1) is an ancestral Caddo site of probable Middle Caddo period (ca. A.D. 1200-1400) age in the Sabine River basin in the Post Oak Savannah of East Texas (Figure 1). The site is on a natural alluvial knoll in the floodplain of the Sabine River and Cottonwood Creek, just north of Cedar Lake, an old channel of the river. The site has been known since the early 1930s by collectors and site looters, early University of Texas (UT) archeologists, and then by later archaeologists from UT and Southern Methodist University, but it has heretofore not been scrutinized by Caddo archaeologists to any serious degree.


Author(s):  
Timothy K. Perttula

The Millsey Williamson site (41RK3) is an 18th century Nadaco Caddo settlement and cemetery situated on an alluvial terrace on the east side of Martin Creek in the Sabine River basin. Some portions of the site are now covered by the waters of Martin Creek Lake, constructed in the 1970s. The site was first investigated in the 1930s, when at least 11 historic Caddo burials were excavated in the cemetery at the western end of the landform. In 1940, Jack Hughes, then an East Texas resident, but later a prominent Texas archaeologist, gathered a small collection of sherds from the Millsey Williamson site, and the analysis of these sherds is the subject of this article.


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):  
Timothy K. Perttula

This article discusses and describes a number of distinctive Paleoindian to Middle Archaic projectile points from East Texas, centering on the middle Sabine River basin and the collecting areas roamed by Buddy Calvin Jones. It is likely that these points were collected in the 1950s and 1960s from the surface at a series of sites in the Sabine River valley.


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

The Jonas Short site (41SA101) is one of a few known and investigated Woodland period mounds in the Trans–Mississippi south (i.e., East Texas, Northwest Louisiana, Southwest Arkansas, and Southeast Oklahoma). In fact, the site is one of only four identified mound sites of possible Woodland period age—and Mossy Grove cultural tradition—in the Neches–Angelina and Sabine river basins in East Texas and Northwest Louisiana: Coral Snake (16SA48), Anthony (16SA7), Jonas Short, and Westerman (41HO15). The Jonas Short site was located on an alluvial terrace of the Angelina River. It was investigated in 1956 by archaeologists from the University of Texas and the River Basin Survey prior to its inundation by the waters of Lake Sam Rayburn.


Author(s):  
Timothy K. Perttula

Site RC–15 (the 15th site recorded in Rusk County by Jones) in Rusk County, Texas, in the Pineywoods, was identified by Buddy Calvin Jones during his wide–ranging survey investigations in East Texas in the 1950s–1960s. This ancestral Caddo site is on Mill Creek, a tributary stream in the mid–Sabine River basin, a few miles south of its confluence with Tiawichi Creek. The Oak Hill Village site (41RK214), a large ancestral Caddo settlement that was occupied between ca. A.D. 1150–1450, is on Mill Creek not far south of Site RC–15.


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

The Mrs. Martin Farm site is a Caddo site in the community of Darco, in south central Harrison County, in the Sabine River basin of the East Texas Pineywoods. The farm was investigated by C. W. Bailey in March 1941, and two Caddo ceramic vessels recovered in this work at depths of ca. 36 and 76 cm bs are now curated at the Gregg County Historical Museum. These vessels are likely funerary offerings from two different burials at the site.


Author(s):  
Timothy K. Perttula

The Dead Cow site is an early to mid-19th century archaeological site located within the northern part (Sabine River basin) of the proposed Republic of Texas 1836 Cherokee Indians land grant in East Texas, generally east of the downtown area of the modem city of Tyler. Cherokee Indians had moved into East Texas by the early 1820s, and "most of the Cherokees cleared land and carved out farms in the uninhabited region directly north of Nacogdoches, on the upper branches of the Neches, Angelina, and Sabine rivers. By 1822 their population had grown to nearly three hundred." To date, historic archaeological sites identified as being occupied by the Cherokee during their ca. 1820-1839 settlement of East Texas remain illusive, and to my knowledge no such sites have been documented to date in the region. This article considers, from an examination of the historic artifact assemblage found here, the possibility that the Dead Cow site is a Cherokee habitation site.


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