Ancestral Caddo Ceramic Vessels from East Texas Sites Held by the Gila Pueblo Museum from 1933 to 2017

Repository Citation Perttula, Timothy K. and Stingley, Kevin (2017) "Ancestral Caddo Ceramic Vessels from East Texas Sites Held by the Gila Pueblo Museum from 1933 to 2017," Index of Texas Archaeology: Open Access Gray Literature from the Lone Star State: Vol. 2017 , Article 49. https://doi.org/10.21112/.ita.2017.1.49 ISSN: 2475-9333 Available at: https://scholarworks.sfasu.edu/ita/vol2017/iss1/49


Introduction
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 (e.g., Perttula 2013).  Perttula 2011)

Goode Hunt Site (41CS23)
The Goode Hunt site is an early historic Nasoni Caddo cemetery in the Black Bayou basin in the East Texas Pineywoods. UT archaeologists investigated the site in 1932 (Perttula 2015). The UT excavations on the knoll opened by wide-spread and eventually contiguous shovel trenching (Perttula 2015: Figure 3).
The principal funerary offering in the ancestral Caddo burials from the Goode Hunt site is ceramic vessels of varying form and decorative motifs/elements. According to Jackson (1932), the 17 graves had 76 ceramic vessels as funerary offerings, with a mean of 4.5 vessels per grave and a range of one to nine vessels; 69 vessels were documented by Perttula (2015). One burial had a ceramic elbow pipe, and seven of the burials had either chipped or ground stone tools. Five burials had mussel shell hoes, and another (Burial I-10) had a mussel shell valve placed inside one of the ceramic vessels. Burial I-15 had a deer mandible in the grave. Five of the Goode Hunt burials had pigment offerings (gray, green, and red). Burial I-7 had a thin piece of metal placed in the grave above the head of the deceased.
The ceramic vessels from the Goode Hunt site are primarily carinated bowls, jars, and bottles, and they have been tempered with grog, bone, and shell. The utility wares placed as funerary offerings in the graves include Foster

Culpepper Site (41HP1)
The Culpepper site (41HP1) is a late (post-A.D. 1600) Titus phase site in the upper Sulphur River the White Oak Creek basin of the larger Sulphur River drainage. Excavations at the Culpepper site by UT archaeologists in 1931 uncovered eight ancestral Caddo burial features with 39 associated ceramic vessel funerary offerings and Talco arrow points (Scurlock 1962;Perttula 2016); collectors had previously excavated 14 burials there and recovered 25 ceramic vessels.
bottles, bowls, carinated bowls, and jars, a number of which are also red-slipped on interior and exterior vessels of var. Carpenter, var. Galt, var. Gandy, and var. Pilgrims; var. Gandy vessels with engraved Simms Engraved, Simms Engraved, var. Darco, Taylor Engraved, Wilder Engraved, var. Ebenezer, and Womack Engraved, var. Culpepper. The Culpepper site and other Titus phase sites along Stouts Creek are part of a very distinctive western Titus phase community that lived in the Post Oak Savannah in the Stouts Creek valley in the late 16 th century and much of the 17 th century A.D. (Perttula 2016). The stylistic character of the ceramic vessels from the Culpepper site suggest the cemetery there was used by Caddo peoples in the 17 th century, perhaps as late as ca. A.D. 1680, prior to any sustained contact between Caddo groups and European explorers and traders.

H. R. Taylor Site (41HS3)
The H. R. Taylor site (41HS3) is a large ancestral Caddo community cemetery in the Pineywoods of East Texas that was used during the latter years (ca. A.D. 1550-1680 or ca. A.D. 1600-1680) of the Late Caddo period Titus phase. The cemetery was excavated in the summer of 1931 by UT (Pearce and Jackson 1931), after the cemetery had been discovered by local persons in 1929 when erosion exposed burials and recovered about 20 ceramic vessels sometime prior to the UT work (Pearce and Jackson 1931;Thurmond 1990:161).
The cemetery at the H. R. Taylor site is located on an upland landform just west of Copeland Creek, trenches just west of Copeland Creek, exposed 64 individual extended burials in a ca. 36 x 24 m area (Perttula 2017: Figure 2). A total of 527 ancestral Caddo ceramic vessels had been placed as funerary offerings in the burial features, along with ceramic pipes, ceramic clay ear spools, arrow points, celts, paint stones, smoothing stones, and two large Galt bifaces (Perttula 2017: Table 1).
The ceramic vessels are primarily carinated bowls, jars, and bottles, and they are tempered almost exclusively with grog. Among the ceramic types that are considered to have been locally manufactured for use in the community cemetery at the H. R. Taylor

T. M. Sanders Site (41LR2)
The T. M. Sanders site (41LR2) is an important ancestral Caddo site 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 vessels exchanged with the Gila Pueblo Museum from the site are from the East Mound. The site was excavated in July and August 1931 (Jackson et al. 2000). The Sanders River.
Excavations in the East Mound at the T. M. Sanders site uncovered 21 burial features: 12 graves with a single individual and the other nine burials with multiple individuals (a total of 48 individuals), from three to eight people in these burial features (Perttula et al. 2016: Figure 4 and Table 1). About 76 percent of the burials had ceramic vessel funerary offerings, with a range of 1-8 vessels per burial feature. Funerary objects placed with the dead in the East Mound also included marine shell gorgets, shell beads, and arrow points, along with ceramic pipes and 60 ceramic vessels. Eleven other vessels had been purchased from the landowner in 1931, along with seven vessels from miscellaneous contexts within the site. The burial features date to the Middle Caddo period Sanders phase, likely dating from ca. A.D. 1200-1400 (Perttula et al. 2016).
The principal ceramic types at the T. M. Sanders site include Sanders Engraved (n=16), Maxey Noded Redware (n=12), and a number of plain (n=23) and slipped (n=6) vessels; these are grog or grog-Plain, while the slipped vessels are labeled as Sanders Slipped (Perttula et al. 2016). There are also four Monkstown Fingernail Impressed jars, two Canton Incised vessels, as well as three Sanders Incised vessels; the decorative elements on these vessels are the same as noted on a number of the Sanders Engraved vessels at the site, except that they are executed in a wet paste, not in an engraved method after

Hooper Glover Farm Site (41MX4)
The Hooper Glover Farm site (41MX4), in the northern part of the Big Cypress Creek basin in Morris County (see Thurmond 1990: Figure 1), was found by B. F. and L. P. Starrett sometime before 1930, when a broken Caddo ceramic vessel was found at the site after it had been plowed from a grave. ceramic vessels and 57 stone artifacts, including 25 Talco arrow points and six celts. The range and character of the funerary objects from this ancestral Caddo cemetery suggest it was in use between ca. A.D. 1550-1680, during the latter part of the Titus phase.

Russell Brothers Site (41TT7)
The Russell Brothers site was a Late Caddo period, Titus phase cemetery excavated by a UT crew Creek in the Big Cypress Creek basin, and may have contained approximately 27 burial features. In addition to funerary offerings that included ceramic elbow pipes, Maud and Bassett arrow points, a stone earspool, celts, and hematite pigment stones, the burial features included 236 ceramic vessels. The cemetery was likely in use in the early part of the 16 th century A.D.
Engraved (several varieties) and Wilder Engraved carinated bowls, compound bowls, and bottles, and Bullard Brushed, Maydelle Incised, and La Rue Neck Banded jars. About 9 percent of the vessels are plain carinated bowls, compound bowls, bottles, and jars (Thurmond 1990:

J. M. Riley Site (41UR2)
that was excavated in 1931 by a UT crew (Jackson 1931). Eighteen graves were in the cemetery, and they contained an abundance of ceramic vessels (n=179), as well as Talco arrow points, pipes, celts, a few other lithic artifacts (n=6), and four burials with offerings of glauconitic clay masses (Thurmond 1990: Table 48

Unknown Site
An extra ceramic vessel was included with the other 20 vessels returned by the Arizona State Museum to TARL. Its site provenience is unknown, but the fact that the vessel is shell-tempered and has a distinctive shape, suggests it is from an ancestral Caddo site on the Red River. Shell-tempered vessels were commonly manufactured in the Late Caddo period (ca. A.D. 1400-1680) by Caddo potters living in several parts of the Red River in East Texas (see Perttula, Trubitt, and Girard 2012) occupied by McCurtain phase and Texarkana phase peoples, and inverted rim carinated bowls (see Suhm and Jelks 1962:Plate 71d, f) were also made in these areas after ca. A.D. 1550.

Summary and Conclusions
In the Summer of 2017 21 ancestral Caddo ceramic vessels that had been held in exchange between The University of Texas (UT) and the Arizona State Museum-and the Gila Pueblo Museum before that since 1933-were returned to UT. These vessels had not been fully studied or documented by UT archaeologists before they were exchanged, so we took the opportunity to complete stylistic and technological analyses of these returned ceramic vessels from eight different East Texas Caddo sites.