scholarly journals An Ancestral Caddo Ceramic Vessel from the Mack Spence Site (41CS6) in the Sulphur River Basin in East Texas

Author(s):  
Timothy Perttula

There is a single ancestral Caddo ceramic vessel in the vessel collections at the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory at The University of Texas at Austin from the Mack Spencer site (41CS6) near the Sulphur River in Cass County, in East Texas. The 2D documentation of the vessel is put on record in this article.

Author(s):  
Timothy K. Perttula

The Brooks-Lindsey site is a probable post-A.D. 1650 Caddo settlement in the Neches River basin in the East Texas Pineywoods. The site was brought to professional archaeological attention in 1986, when collectors who were working the site contacted archaeologists at the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory at The University of Texas at Austin (TARL), and allowed them to examine the ceramic vessel sherd collection they had assembled at that time from surface collections and various excavations.


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):  
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 W. T. Robinson Farm site (41AN4) is one of a number of ancestral Caddo sites known in the Caddo Creek valley in the upper Neches River basin in East Texas. The site, about 2.5 miles northwest of Frankston, Texas, was investigated by archaeologists from the University of Texas (UT) in 1931 in an area where locals had reportedly excavated 15 Caddo vessels some 20 years earlier. The UT investigations found no Caddo burials or vessels, and recovered only a small assemblage of ceramic vessel sherds.


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

Site 41SM91 is an ancestral Caddo habitation site on an upland landform east of the Neches River, in the area of Lake Palestine, a large reservoir constructed on the Neches River in the East Texas Pineywoods; the dam is located about 11 km south of the site. The site was found and recorded during a 1957 survey of the proposed reservoir flood pool, and Johnson described it as “a large Frankston Focus habitation site located in a cultivated field on the slope of a large hill to the east of the Neches floodplain”. A large assemblage of ceramic vessel sherds were collected from the surface of the site during the archaeological survey, and these sherds are in the collections of the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin.


Author(s):  
Timothy Perttula

The Sam Stripling site (41NA197) is an ancestral Caddo settlement on a series of alluvial knolls in the floodplain on the east side of Bayou Loco in the Angelina River basin in the East Texas Pineywoods. The site was first located by Robert L. Turner, Sr. and Jr. in 1938, and in 1939 they told Gus Arnold of the University of Texas about the site when Arnold was conducting a Works Progress Administration (WPA)-sponsored archaeological survey of East Texas. Arnold collected a large sample of ceramic vessel sherds from the site (ET-601) during his 1939 survey work, and these collections are held by the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory at The University of Texas at Austin; the Turner’s had also amassed a substantial collection during their work; and in 1996 Tom Middlebrook returned to the site and officially recorded it, noting a well-preserved midden deposit in one part of the site, while also inventorying the Turner’s collection. In this article, I discuss the specific character of the ancestral Caddo ceramic assemblage from the Sam Stripling site recovered during Arnold’s work. Analyses by Middlebrook of the other known collections from the site are in progress.


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.


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