Documentation of Ancestral Caddo Ceramic Vessels from the Knight’s Bluff (41CS14) and Sherwin (41CS26) Sites, Cass County, Texas

Cite this Record Perttula, Timothy K. (2017) "Documentation of Ancestral Caddo Ceramic Vessels from the Knight’s Bluff (41CS14) and Sherwin (41CS26) Sites, Cass County, Texas," Index of Texas Archaeology: Open Access Gray Literature from the Lone Star State: Vol. 2017, Article 59. https://doi.org/10.21112/.ita.2017.1.59 ISSN: 2475-9333 Available at: https://scholarworks.sfasu.edu/ita/vol2017/iss1/59


Introduction
A number of years ago, Perttula et al. (2009) 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 (Perttula et al. 2009) (Figure 1). 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.

Ceramic Vessel Analysis
As with other ancestral Caddo ceramic vessel documentation studies completed of ceramic assemblages from East Texas sites in recent years, the following consistent set of attributes were employed in the study and documentation of the ceramic vessels from this collection from the Knight's Bluff and Sherwin sites: Non-plastics: Deliberate and indeterminate materials in the paste (Rice 1987:411), including a variety of tempers (i.e., grog or crushed sherds, bone, hematite, and shell, as well as combinations of different temper inclusions) and "particulate matter of some size. " The grog, bone, hematite, or shell appears to have been deliberately added to the paste as tempers. The bone or shell used for temper had been burned and calcined, then crushed, before it was added to the paste.
Vessel Form: Vessel form categories include open containers (bowls of several sizes, including effigy bowls, carinated bowls, and compound bowls) and restricted containers, including jars and bottles, as well as plates. As restricted containers, jars allow access by hand, but bottles do not (Brown 1996:335). Other form attributes that were recorded include the rim profile (outflaring or everted, vertical or standing, and inverted), lip profile (rolled to the exterior, rounded, flat, or thinned), and base shape (circular or square, and flat or rounded).
Core Colors: Observations on ceramic cross-section colors permit consideration of oxidation patterns (Teltser 1993:Figure 2a-h), and thus the conditions under which the vessel was fired and then cooled after firing. Comments are included for these attributes on the presence and location of fire-clouding, sooting or smudging from cooking use (Skibo 1992), and the preservation of any charred organic remains.
Wall Thickness: Thickness was recorded in millimeters, using a vernier caliper, at the lip, along the rim, at several points along the body, and at the base when possible (only for the vessels that were not complete).
Interior and Exterior Surface Treatment: The primary methods of finishing the surface of the vessels includes either smoothing, burnishing, and polishing (Rice 1987:138). Brushing, while a popular method of roughening the surface (particularly the body) of large and small Middle (ca. A.D. 1200-1450) and Late Caddo (ca. A.D. 1450-1680) period cooking jars in several parts of the Caddo area, is here considered a decorative treatment rather than solely a functional surface treatment (cf. Rice 1987:138), although not all Caddo ceramic analysts treat brushing as a decorative treatment. Smoothing creates "a finer and more regular surface… [and] has a matte rather than a lustrous finish" (Rice 1987:138). Burnishing, on the other hand, creates an irregular lustrous finish marked by parallel facets left by the burnishing tool (perhaps a pebble or bone). A polished surface treatment is marked by a uniform and highly lustrous surface finish, done when the vessel is dry, but without "the pronounced parallel facets produced by burnishing leather-hard clay" (Rice 1987:138).
The application of a hematite-rich clay slip (Ferring and Perttula 1987), either red or black after firing in an oxidizing or reducing (i.e., low-oxygen) environment, is another form of surface treatment noted in many East Texas assemblages, and the frequency of redslipped vessels is a notable characteristic of some vessel assemblage. On these vessels, the clay slip is more frequently applied on the vessel exterior, or on both surfaces, than on the interior surface, and then was either burnished or polished after it was leather-hard or dry.
Height and Orifice Diameter: These attributes, measured in centimeters, were recorded with a ruler.
Diameter at Bottom of Rim and Base Diameter: Also recorded in millimeters using a ruler, these attributes permit characterization of the overall contour and shape of the vessel.
Volume: With measurements of height and orifice diameter obtained from the vessels, as well as other measurements of size (i.e., base diameter and maximum body width), volumes were estimated by comparison with known vessel volumes of specific forms (i.e., carinated bowl, jar, bottle, compound bowl, and bowl) in many other recently documented Caddo vessel assemblages.
Base Diameter and Shape: these attributes were either measured in centimeters or by shape attributes: circular or square, and flat or round.
Decoration: Decorative techniques present in the vessel collections from Caddo sites in East Texas include engraving, incising, trailing, pinching, punctations, neck banding, brushing, and appliquéing, and on certain vessels, combinations of decorative techniques (i.e., incised-punctated) created the decorative elements and motifs. Engraving was done with a sharp tool when the vessel was either leather-hard, or after it was fired, as were the tick marks often seen on vessels in these collections, while the other decorative techniques were executed with tools (trailing, incising, and punctation), by adding strips of clay to the wet body (appliqué), using frayed sticks or grass stems (brushing) dragged across the body surface, or fingernails (certain forms of punctations and pinching), when the vessel was wet or still plastic. Excising is considered a form of engraved decoration, where the clay is deliberately and closely marked/scraped and carved away with a sharp tool, usually to create triangular elements, tick marks, or excised punctations.
Use of Pigments: Another form of vessel decoration is the use of red (hematite or ochre) or white (kaolin clay) clay pigments that have been smeared or rubbed into the engraved lines of certain vessels.
Type: The kinds of ceramic types and defined varieties in the collections from East Texas sites follow Suhm and Jelks (1962), Schambach and Miller (1984), Fields et al. (2014), and for any post-1962 ceramic types: Perttula and Selden (2014).

Knight's Bluff Site Vessels
Ten burials were excavated at the Knight's Bluff site by Jelks (1961) in two different small prehistoric cemeteries on either side of a Caddo structure (Jelks 1961:Figure 4). Another burial had been excavated at the site by I. B. Price, Jr. in 1931, and the vessel subsequently donated to the University of Texas. The kind and range of artifacts recovered in habitation and burial features at the Knight's Bluff site indicate that it was occupied during the Middle Caddo period (Cliff 1997;Perttula 1998).

Sherwin Site Vessels
The Sherwin site was also occupied during the Middle Caddo period (ca. A.D. 1200-1400) (Cliff 1997). It is a habitation site with a large midden deposit (Jelks 1961:57) that had probably accumulated inside a structure. During Jelks' (1961: Figure 8) excavations at the Sherwin site, a total of eight prehistoric burials were excavated, six in a small cemetery at the northern end of the site and Burials 3 and 8 some distance to the south and southeast.

Summary and Conclusions
There are 39 ancestral Caddo ceramic vessels from the Knight's Bluff (41CS14) and Sherwin (41CS26) sites in the TARL collections, almost all from burial features in Middle Caddo period (ca. A.D. 1200-1400) family cemeteries. Nine of these vessels had been previously documented by Perttula et al. (2009) as part of a NAGPRA grant awarded to the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma, and the remainder have been documented in this article.
The proportion of vessel forms at the Knight's Bluff and Sherwin sites is virtually identical (Table 1). More than 53 percent of the vessels from the two sites are jars, and another 31 percent are bottles. Only 7.7 percent of the vessels are carinated bowls, and the remainder are bowls (5.1 percent) and compound bowls (2.6 percent).

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The vessels from both sites are tempered with grog or crushed sherds (Table 2). About 67 percent of the vessels are tempered solely with grog, and 26 percent have also had burned bone added as an aplastic: vessels, both from the Sherwin site, are tempered with grog and crushed pieces of hematite.

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Approximately 10 percent of the vessels at the Knight's Bluff and Sherwin are plain ware vessels (n=4), one vessel at Knight's Bluff and three vessels in the Sherwin site assemblage. Utility wares (i.e., vessels with wet paste decorations, including brushing, incised lines, punctations, etc.) comprise about 54 percent of the vessel assemblage, and these are primarily jars, but one vessel from the Sherwin site is a carinated bowl with incised decorative elements (see Figure 16). The principal utility wares at both sites are Pease Brushed-Incised (n=8 vessels) and a grog-tempered or early variety of Nash Neck Banded (n=6). Other utility wares have appliqued (n=2), brushed-appliqued decorative elements (n=1), brushedpunctated decorative elements (n=1), tool punctated rows (n=1), and punctated-appliqued decorative elements (n=1). the engraved vessels are primarily bottles of Haley Engraved (n=4), Antioch Engraved (see Jelks 1961) Friendship Engraved carinated bowl from Knight's Bluff, a Glassell Engraved bottle from Burial 9 at Knight's Bluff, and a Barkman Engraved compound bowl from Burial 11 at Knight's Bluff. There are Caddo period vessels from the Paul Mitchell site (41BW4) on the Red River (see Perttula et al. 2016:10-24, 28-34).