scholarly journals The Oliver Bolton Collection of Dart and Spear Points from Camp County, Texas, and Other Remarks

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 ◽  
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

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

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):  
Mark Walters ◽  
Patti Haskins ◽  
David H. Jurney ◽  
S. Eileen Goldborer ◽  
Timothy K. Perttula

The Redwine site (41SM193) is a probable Middle Caddoan habitation site located on an upland terrace (Figure I) on the headwaters of Auburn Creek, a small tributary of the Sabine River in central Smith County; the Angelina River drainage basin begins about 1.5 km to the south of the site. Auburn Creek is about 100 meters to the north of the site. The Sabine River lies approximately 24 km to the north. Soils on the Redwine site are Bowie fine sandy loam. The site was discovered in the early 1960s by Sam Whlteside an avocational archaeologist who lived in the Tyler area. His work consisted of trenching, and he located and excavated several burials and a small house mound. In an attempt to relocate the site limited controlled excavations were undertaken in 1995 by the authors, under the direction of Dr. John Keller of Southern Archaeological Consultants, Inc. We hoped to gain enough information about the size, age, and integrity of the Redwine site to apply for legal designation and protection under the Antiquities Code of Texas. After confirming that the Redwine site contained important archaeological information, an application for State Archeological Landmark (SAL) designation was made in 1996, and in July 1996, the Redwine site was officially designated an SAL by the Texas Historical Commission, the first SAL in Smith County. This paper describes our findings, and discusses the artifacts and plant and animal remains recovered during the work. We also provide information on the 1960s excavations of a small house mound at the site, along with the grave goods recovered by Sam Whiteside from the four Redwine site burials.


Author(s):  
Timothy K. Perttula

Archaeological evidence from 15th to 17th century (dating from ca. A.D. 1430-1680) Caddo sites that have been investigated in the Big Cypress Creek and Sabine River basins of northeastern Texas indicate that many of the components have been identified as belonging to the Titus phase. They represent permanent, year-round, settlements of horticultural or agricultural peoples with distinctive cultural practices and material culture. The 15th to 17th century archaeological record in these two basins “refers to a number of distinctive socio-cultural groups, not a single Caddo group; these groups or communities were surely related and/or affiliated by kinship, marriage, and social interaction." There are several clusters of settlements that apparently represent parts of contemporaneous small communities. A political community as used here is a cluster of interrelated settlements and associated cemeteries that are centered on a key site or group of sites distinguished by public architecture (i.e., earthen mounds) and large domestic village areas. The Shelby Mound site is one of the premier sites in a political community centered in the Greasy Creek basin and neighboring Big Cypress Creek basin. The social and cultural diversity that probably existed among Titus phase cultural groups is matched by the stylistic and functional diversity in Titus phase material culture, particularly in the manufacture and use of fine ware and utility ware ceramics, and the ceramic tradition is the surest grounds for evaluating attribution of archaeological components to the Titus phase. It is the character of their stylistically unique material culture, coupled with the development of distinctive mortuary rituals and social and religious practices centered on the widespread use of community cemeteries and mound ceremonialism as means to mark social identities, that most readily sets these Caddo groups apart from their neighbors in East and Northeast Texas and in the Red River basin to the north and east. This article discusses the analysis of the plain and decorated ceramic sherds (focusing on the latter) from the mound deposits at the Shelby Mound site in the Robert L. Turner collection. Because of the stratified nature of the mound deposits it is possible that temporal changes in the stylistic character of the utility wares and fine wares in use at the site can be detected, and full documentation of the assemblage at Shelby Mound will be key in stylistic comparisons of the ceramic traditions among contemporaneous Titus phase communities in the Big Cypress Creek basin and the mid-Sabine River basin.


Author(s):  
Timothy K. Perttula

The Grace Creek #1 site (41GG33, GC–1) was situated on a natural alluvial rise on the east side of Grace Creek, about 0.4 km north of its confluence with the Sabine River. On the north side of the site was an abandoned Sabine River lake bed, while to the south was an old channel, as well as a channel lake (Muddy Lake), of the Sabine River. Jones divided the site into three areas (A, B, and C); a midden deposit was apparently located in Area B on the central part of the rise. Buddy Calvin Jones identified and worked at the Grace Creek #1 site between 1954 and 1956, while the site was being destroyed for the construction of an earthen dike along Grace Creek and the Sabine River. In addition to the extensive surface collection of projectile points, lithic tools, and ceramic sherds he found there, in areas A–C, Jones also conducted limited excavations in areas where apparently organically–stained soil and possible feature stains were noted on the scraped surface of the site. In these excavations, he documented midden deposits, a flexed burial in the midden deposits in Area B, two pit features in this area, and several small (ca. 10 cm in diameter) post holes in Area C. Jones' map of the site did not indicate the location of the excavations in Area C, but Jones suggested that aboriginal houses were likely present here. The ceramic artifacts discussed in this article are from a fire pit in Area B that was excavated by Buddy Jones in October 1956. There are also a number of arrow points in the collections from the site, as well as a large ceramic elbow pipe. These materials are in the collections of the Gregg County Historical Museum in Longview, Texas.


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 ◽  
Elsbeth Dowd ◽  
Lee Green ◽  
George Morgan ◽  
Bo Nelson ◽  
...  

The Tuinier Farm (41HP237), R. A. Watkins (41HP238), and Anglin (41HP240) sites are 16th to 17th century Caddo sites in the modern-day Post Oak Savannah of Northeast Texas. All three of the sites are located on Stouts Creek, in the eastern part of Hopkins County, Texas, a northward-flowing tributary to White Oak Creek in the Sulphur River basin; the modern channel of White Oak Creek lies ca. 15 km north of these sites. The Culpepper site (41HP1), a previously investigated mid-to late 17th century Caddo habitation and cemetery site, is about 2 km downstream. Small areas of tall-grass prairie lie to the north between the Stouts Creek sites and White Oak Creek, but the eastern extent of the larger White Oak and Sulphur prairies is approximately 15 km to the west and northwest. At the time of the Caddo occupation of the Stouts Creek sites, the climate was wetter and warmer than today, with significant mesic periods between A.D. 1477- 1524, A.D. 1539-1572, and A.D. 1603-1670. After A.D. 1670, the years from A.D. 1671 -1676 were relatively cool and dry. The more mesic periods had more equitable rainfall (adequate growing season rainfall) and this, combined with the warmer temperatures, led to an increased net productivity and carrying capacity of plants and animals in the Post Oak Savannah and Pineywoods that were settled by Titus phase populations. The Tuinier Farm site is the closest of the three sites to the headwaters of Stouts Creek. It is situated on a relatively flat and sandy upland ridge (460 feet amsl) about 1 km south of the Anglin site and just east of Stouts Creek. Anglin is on a sandy knoll (460 feet amsl) on an upland slope, also east of Stouts Creek. The third site, R. A. Watkins, is 1.2 km northwest of the Anglin site, also on an upland slope, but 200 m east of an intermittent tributary to Stouts Creek and 1 km from Stouts Creek.


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.


2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (9) ◽  
pp. 11-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edgard Belfort ◽  
Javier González

The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela covers 916 445 km2; to the north is the Caribbean Sea, to the south-east the Amazonian region and the plains of Brazil and Colombia, and to the west the Andes and the Colombian Guajira peninsula. Its estimated population (2004) is 25 226 million, which is concentrated along the north coastal area, where the population density exceeds 200 inhabitants per km2; most of the territory remains almost inhabited (fewer than 6 inhabitants per km2), in particular the border areas. The population is mainly urban: 70% live in cities with more than 50 000 inhabitants.


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