scholarly journals Caddo Ceramic Vessels from the T. M. Sanders Site (41LR2) on the Red River in Lamar County, Texas

Author(s):  
Timothy Perttula ◽  
Mark Walters ◽  
Bo Nelson

The T. M. Sanders site (41LR2) is one of the more important ancestral Caddo sites known in East Texas, primarily because of its two earthen mounds and the well-preserved mortuary features of Caddo elite persons buried in Mound No. 1 (the East Mound). The Sanders site is located on a broad alluvial terrace just south of the confluence of Bois d’Arc Creek and the Red River. The terrace has silt loam soils, which have a shallow dark brown silt loam A-horizon overlying thick B- and C-horizons that range from dark reddish-brown, reddish-brown, dark brown, to yellowish-red in color. These soils formed in loamy alluvial sediments of the Red River. In this Special Publication, we discuss the analysis and documentation of the 78 ceramic vessels from the T. M. Sanders site in the collections of the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory at The University of Texas at Austin. Our concern is in documenting the stylistic and technological character of these vessels, and assessing their cultural relationships and stylistic associations; almost 80 percent of these vessels are from burial features excavated by University of Texas archaeologists in Mound No. 1 (East Mound) in July and August 1931; others are from excavations in midden deposits between the two mounds. We also consider and revise the current ceramic taxonomy for a number of the vessels from the T. M. Sanders site.

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

The Womack site (41LR1) is an ancestral Caddo settlement situated on an alluvial terrace in a horseshoe bend of the Red River in north central Lamar County in East Texas. Harris completed the analysis and study of their 1938-mid-1960s investigations at the site, but the findings from the earlier archaeological investigations conducted at the site by the University of Texas (UT) in 1931 have only been recently published.


Author(s):  
Timothy Perttula ◽  
Kevin Stingley

In the summer of 2017, 21 ancestral Caddo ceramic vessels held since 1933 by the Gila Pueblo Museum and then by the Arizona State Museum were returned to the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory at The University of Texas at Austin (TARL). These vessels had not been properly or fully studied and documented when the University of Texas exchanged these vessels, so our purpose in documenting these vessels now is primarily concerned with determining the stylistic (i.e., decorative methods, motifs, and decorative elements) and technological (i.e., vessel form, temper, and vessel size) character of the vessels that are in the collection, and assessing their cultural relationships and stylistic associations, along with their likely age. In 1933, little was known about the cultural and temporal associations of ancestral Caddo ceramic vessels from East Texas, but that has changed considerably since that time.


Author(s):  
Timothy Perttula

In this article, I document 28 ancestral Caddo ceramic vessels from seven sites and one general collection in the whole vessel collections at the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory (TARL) at The University of Texas at Austin (UT). These sites and general collection are in Anderson and Cherokee counties in East Texas (Figure 1), specifically the: Rube Beard site (41AN18, n=2), the Edward W. Ellis site (41AN36, n=1), the Ray Lookabaugh site (41AN37, n=1), the R. E. Daly site (41AN39, n=9), the Jasper Tucker/Mrs. Joe Watkins Farm site (41AN44, n=11; see also Perttula and Selden [2015]), the W. T. Todd site (41AN52, n=1), the N. B. Ruggles site (41CE40, n=2), and one vessel from the Cherokee County general collections. The methods of ceramic vessel analysis follow those specified in Perttula (2018:2-4), among other publications on Caddo ceramic vessel documentation, methods consistently employed since the 1990s in the documentation of ancestral Caddo ceramic vessels in East Texas sites.


Author(s):  
Timothy Perttula

This article puts on record the documentation of 17 ancestral Caddo ceramic vessels from five sites in Harrison and Titus counties in East Texas in the collections of the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory at The University of Texas at Austin. This documentation is part of the overall and larger effort to develop an ancestral Caddo ceramic vessel database as well as build online ceramic vessel galleries on the Index of Texas Archeology website by Dr. Robert Z. Selden, Jr.


Author(s):  
Timothy K. Perttula

A number of years ago, Perttula documented a variety of funerary objects through a Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) grant awarded to the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma. These were from ancestral Caddo sites on U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Fort Worth District lands in East Texas, including funerary objects from the Knight’s Bluff and Sherwin sites at Lake Wright Patman in the Sulphur River basin. These NAGPRA materials are held at the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory at The University of Texas at Austin (TARL). At that time, only a few ceramic vessel funerary objects were made available for NAGPRA documentation purposes, including only three ceramic vessels from Burial 4 at the Knight’s Bluff site, and six vessels from Burials 4 and 6 at the Sherwin site. The remainder of the ceramic vessel funerary objects from these two sites (n=16 vessels from Knight’s Bluff and n=13 vessels from the Sherwin site), plus one vessel from general Lake Wright Patman contexts, either from Knight’s Bluff or the Sherwin site, have recently been documented, and they are discussed in the remainder of this article.


Author(s):  
Timothy K. Perttula

The Keasler site (41HS235) is a post-ca. A.D. 1430 Late Caddo period, Titus phase cemetery with at least 31 burials in the East Texas Pineywoods. The site was excavated by collectors in the late 1970s on the property of Sid Keasler of Hallsville, Texas. Minimal records on the burials at the site, and their contents, were provided by Red McFarland, one of the collectors, to the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory at The University of Texas (TARL). The Keasler site is near Little Creek, a northward-flowing tributary to Little Cypress Creek. It is perhaps one of the easternmost-known Titus phase cemeteries in East Texas, in an area where few Titus phase sites or cemeteries have been identified or investigated by professional archaeologists. Based on the analysis of the available records and vessel images at TARL, Perttula noted that funerary offerings in the burials primarily included ceramic vessels—both utility and fine wares—in almost all of the burials, along with clay pipes and arrow points in only a few of the graves. The subtle differences between two different burial groups in the number and kind of funerary offerings in the cemetery do not provide much evidence of differential status or social rank, and the frequency of funerary offerings as attested to in the TARL records is at the low end of the scale in Titus phase cemeteries. The burials at the Keasler site appear to be those of common members of the Caddo community living in the lower part of the Little Cypress Creek basin. The range of decorated utility ware and fine ware vessels placed in the burial features are consistent with use of the cemetery by ancestral Caddo peoples in parts of the 16th and 17th centuries A.D. Subsequent to the analysis of the available records at TARL from the Keasler site, funerary offerings from the site in the Sid Keasler collection have come to light. In July 1999, Mark Walters and Bo Nelson photo-documented the Keasler collection, which represents approximately 50 percent of the funerary offerings recovered by Red McFarland. This article summarizes the character of the funerary offerings in the collection. Walters also recorded the nearby Pine Grove site (41HS826), which may represent one habitation area associated with the use of the cemetery at the Keasler site by ancestral Caddo peoples.


Author(s):  
Timothy K. Perttula

The Eli Moores site (41BW2) is an important ancestral Caddo mound center and habitation site on the Red River in the East Texas Pineywoods, likely part of the Nasoni Caddo village visited by the Teran de los Rios entrada in 1691. The Eli Moores site is situated on a natural levee of the Red River, currently about 2.5 km north of the site. The site, occupied from the 17th to the early 18th century, may have been the residence of the Caddi of the Nasoni Caddo when it was visited by the French and Spanish, and the Xinesi lived in a temple on the mound at the nearby Hatchel site (41BW3). The site was investigated by the University of Texas in 1932, and in one of the mounds and in associated midden deposits, the remains of Caddo structures, midden deposits, features, eight burials (with nine individuals), and a large ceramic and lithic assemblage were recovered, along with well-preserved plant and faunal remains.


Author(s):  
Timothy Perttula

Site 41HS74 is an ancestral Caddo habitation site and cemetery on Hatley Creek, a southwardflowing tributary to the Sabine River, in the East Texas Pineywoods (Figure 1). The site was investigated in 1986 by Heartfield, Price and Greene, Inc. (1988). The re-analysis of the ceramic vessels recovered from nine burial features at the site are the subject of this article. The vessels are curated at the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory at The University of Texas at Austin (TARL).


Author(s):  
Timothy K. Perttula

Excavations in 1940 by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) at the Fred Yarbrough site (41VN6) in the upper Sabine River basin recovered a number of ceramic vessels from Area B of the site. Johnson provided an initial description of the vessels as well as drawings of a number of the reconstructed vessels. In this article, I reexamine the nine vessels from the Fred Yarbrough site held in the collections of the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin (TARL), employing the vessel documentation protocol used in recent years to document ancestral Caddo vessels from sites in East Texas, and I also provide photographs of each of the vessels.


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

The distinctive Caddo ceramic vessels from the lower Neches–Angelina (i.e., Lake Sam Rayburn) and the lower Sabine (i.e., Toledo Bend Reservoir) river basins are not well understood, due to current cultural phase taxonomic difficulties and poorly defined ceramic assemblages. Sites in these areas were included in the Angelina focus by Jelks, which was a “broadly defined unit encompassing the entire Caddoan [sic] sequence in the Lake Sam Rayburn locality; needs reevaluation in light of larger sample of sites which are known in the area." Perttula used the term late Angelina focus to refer to sites in these localities that date after ca. A.D. 1400, but this taxonomic terminology is also not satisfactory. The vessels from the Lake Sam Rayburn Caddo sites warrant restudy, because currently it is difficult to determine what a representative assemblage of ceramic fine ware and utility ware vessels from this part of the Neches–Angelina River basin looks like, and the differing affiliations of local Caddo groups. Few of the vessels recovered from burials at Lake Sam Rayburn have been typologically identified. The rarity of Belcher Ridged sherds in the Lake Sam Rayburn sites when compared to their frequency in Toledo Bend Reservoir sites appears to indicate that the ancestral Caddo groups that once occupied these two areas had distinctly different utility ware traditions. Furthermore, stylistically–related Titus phase and Belcher phase engraved fine wares are absent in the Lake Sam Rayburn sites, much different from the Toledo Bend Reservoir ceramic assemblages, a trend which may be indicative of differing populations of Caddo peoples living in these two locales. The Lake Sam Rayburn ceramic assemblages warrant a thorough reanalysis—paired with radiocarbon dates from organics (and organic residues on sherds and vessels) in the collections—before it will be possible to establish their temporal, stylistic, and compositional character and diversity, and explore their relationship to other ancestral Caddo ceramic traditions in East Texas and Northwest Louisiana. This article summarizes the reanalysis of the Lake Sam Rayburn ceramic vessels. There are 21 vessels in the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory, The University of Texas at Austin collections from Lake Sam Rayburn archaeological investigations. This includes: 12 vessels from Walter Bell (41SB50); one vessel from Bird Point Islands (41SB71); one vessel from the Sawmill site (41SA89); six vessels from the Wylie Price site (41SA94); and one vessel from the Blount site (41SA123).


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