The A. S. Mann (41HE7/41AN201) and M. S. Roberts (41HE8) Sites in the Upper Neches River Basin, Henderson County, Texas

Cite this Record Perttula, Timothy K. and Troell, Waldo (2016) "The A. S. Mann (41HE7/41AN201) and M. S. Roberts (41HE8) Sites in the Upper Neches River Basin, Henderson County, Texas," Index of Texas Archaeology: Open Access Gray Literature from the Lone Star State: Vol. 2016, Article 101. https://doi.org/ 10.21112/.ita.2016.1.101 ISSN: 2475-9333 Available at: https://scholarworks.sfasu.edu/ita/vol2016/iss1/101


INTRODUCTION
The upper Neches River basin in East Texas has been the scene of archaeological research since the early 1900s (see Perttula et al. 2011:19-34), with a particular focus on the post-A.D. 1000 archaeological record of the Caddo peoples in the region. The A. S. Mann (41HE7) and M. S. Roberts (41HE8) sites are ancestral Caddo sites located in the modern-day Pineywoods (Figure 1) that were investigated by University of Texas (UT) archaeologists in the 1930s. I want to thank Waldo Troell for bringing these sites to my attention.

S. Mann Site (41HE7/41AN201)
The A. S. Mann site is the location of a small ancestral Caddo cemetery in the Caddo Creek valley in the upper Neches River basin, about 6.5 km west of the small town of Frankston, Texas (see Figure 1, see also Troell's discussion below). The cemetery was found by a Mr. John Riley in June or July, 1935, when he noted a ceramic bottle eroding from a gully that crossed an uncultivated eld.
In ctober 1935, UT archaeologists followed up on this nd and excavated a number of areas around the bottle (Woolsey 1935). In this work, they identi ed two Caddo burials (AF-1 and AF-2) the bottle found earlier by Riley was one of the funerary offerings in Burial AF-1 (Figure 2).
Burial AF-1 was that of an adult laid out in an extended supine position, with the head at the eastern end of the grave and facing west. The grave was 208 x 56 cm in length and width, and 56 cm in depth. Eight ceramic vessels were placed in the grave, primarily around the head and the upper body (Figure 3), as funerary offerings.
Remnants of a second burial-AF-2-were found ca. 2. 7 m south of Burial AF-1 (see Figure 2). It had been almost completely disturbed by plowing, and all that remained were pieces of a right femur and the base of a ceramic bottle (Woolsey 1935). The grave was 122 x 41 cm in length and width, and only ca. 24 cm in depth; the size of the grave suggests that Burial AF-2 was that of a child or adolescent. Journal of Northeast Texas Archaeology 59 (2016) 3

Ceramic Vessels from Burial AF-1
The eight vessels from Burial AF-1 at the A. S. Mann site include one bottle, one jar, an olla fragment, three carinated bowls, a small beaker, and an ef gy bowl (with the ef gy head missing). The decorative styles on several of the vessels indicate that the burial dates to some part of the Late Caddo period Frankston phase (ca. A.D. 1400-1650  The vessel body is divided into four panels by sets of three or four closely-spaced vertical engraved lines (Figure 4). Two of the panels have two or three large hatched pendant triangles along the vertical axis and two upper or lower hatched pendant triangles on the horizontal axis of the panels. The other two panels have sets of semi-circles on the vertical axis, and these semi-circles have either two or three large hatched pendant triangles. There are also single upper and lower hatched pendant triangles in these panels, as well as one stand-alone hatched triangle in the lower left corner of the panels.  With the help of TARL staff members Jonathan Jarvis and Jean Hughes, I located the original report by J. E. Pearce and A. M. Woolsey (1935) and the site maps. This information indicated three important points about the site location, one being that Pearce and Woolsey believed (correctly) that the A.S. Mann Farm was in Anderson County. The second point was that the eld work was done in 1935, which meant that Woolsey was referring to the new Highway 40 that later became U.S. 175. The third point was that Woolsey did not take precise measurements but guessed at the distance of landmarks and features. A number of the measurements were changed several times after returning from the eld, then rounded up for the report. The highway location and name changes coupled with the imprecise site location measurements caused the site to be later incorrectly plotted in Henderson County. Since Pearce and his UT staff recorded multiple sites on Highway 40, one has to take into account the year the eld work was performed to determine if one needs to measure from the current highway U.S. 175 or the old location of Highway 40 to locate these old sites.

M. S. Roberts Site (41HE8)
This ancestral Caddo site was reported to Dr. J. E. Pearce of The University of Texas (UT) in September 1931 by Jeff D. Reagan of Palestine, Texas. In October 1931, a UT crew investigated the site, which had an earthen mound and an associated settlement (Pearce and Jackson 1931).
The site is on an alluvial terrace (420 ft. amsl) on the north side of Caddo Creek, an eastward-owing tributary to the Neches River, about 1.6 km west of Poynor, Texas (see Figure 1). The M. S. Roberts site has a single earthen mound about 24 x 20 m in length and width, and it was estimated to stand 1.7 m in height. A likely borrow pit depression was noted just to the west of the mound. Artifacts were noted and collected by Pearce and Jackson (1931) from the plowed surface of the mound and surrounding Caddo habitation areas on the alluvial terrace.
The UT work consisted of the excavation of an unknown number of trenches into the earthen mound. The trenches disclosed an undifferentiated mound ll from 0-114 cm bs that had ash, ceramic sherds, and animal bones. The mound ll rested atop a clay oor (114-122 cm bs) from a burned Caddo structure, and this clay oor was placed atop the rst mound ll zone, a yellow sand (122-146 cm bs) that also had unspeci ed associated midden materials. These rst mound deposits were constructed on top of the natural ground surface, a brown sandy loam A-and E-horizon that was uncovered between 146-196+ cm bs. The mound at the M. S. Roberts site was undoubtedly built to cover an important Caddo structure, most likely a structure used for political and religious ceremonies or used as the residence of an important and elite member of the local Caddo community.

Ceramic Sherds
There are 419 sherds from ceramic vessels in the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory (TARL) collections from the M. S. Roberts site (Table 1). This includes 253 plain sherds and 166 decorated sherds; the plain to decorated sherd ratio is 1.52. About 83 percent of the decorated sherds (and 52 percent of all the rim sherds from the assemblage) are from utility ware vessels, namely vessels that were decorated with wet paste designs (i.e., incised, punctated, brushed, etc.). That 31 percent of the rims in the assemblage are from plain wares (Table 1) suggests that plain wares (jars and bowls) were in relatively common use at the site, as were utility wares (primarily jars). Among the plain sherds is the rim to an ef gy bowl as well as a broken ceramic spindle whorl. The drilled hole in the spindle whorl is 9.6 mm in diameter.
Based on the decorated sherds from the site, the sherds from the M. S. Roberts site are from vessels tempered with either grog (i.e., crushed sherds) or burned bone (Table 2). About 86 percent of the sherds are from grog-tempered vessels; more than 96 percent of the ne ware sherds are from grog-tempered vessels, compared to 84 percent of the utility wares. Overall, 14 percent of the sherds are from bone-tempered vessels: 15.9 percent of the utility wares but only 3.6 percent of the ne wares. The principal decorative methods represented in the utility ware sherds from the M. S. Roberts site have incised (n=52, 37.7 percent), punctated (n=39, 28.3 percent), and brushed (n=28, 20.3 percent) decorative elements (Table 3); another 4.3 percent of the sherds have brushed-incised or brushed-punctated decorative elements. Sixty percent of the utility ware rim sherds have incised decorative elements.  The incised sherds from the M. S. Roberts site have primarily straight line and/or geometric decorative elements (see Table 2), and are from Maydelle Incised vessels. The most frequent incised decorative elements other than parallel incised lines have diagonal opposed (Figure 7c), cross-hatched, diagonal, and horizontal and diagonal lines. One sherd has hatched zones (Figure 7e), and only one sherd (1.8 percent of the incised sherds) has curvilinear incised decorative elements. The most distinctive incised ceramics from the M. S. Roberts site are the sherds that have Poynor Engraved style scrolls and hatched triangle decorative elements that have been executed with incised lines rather than engraved lines (Figure 7a-b, d); these comprise 7.7 percent of the incised sherds in the assemblage. Three sherds (2.2 percent of the utility ware sherd assemblage), including a strap handle, have appliqued decorative elements. These include parallel llets on the strap handle, a body sherd with curvilinear appliqued ridges, and another body sherd with a straight appliqued llet and an adjacent appliqued node (Figure 8a). These sherds are probably from La Rue Neck Banded jars (see Suhm and Jelks 1962:93).
The sherds from vessels with brushing marks include one rim with horizontal brushing marks and body sherds with diagonal, opposed, overlapping, and parallel (probably oriented vertically) brushing marks on the vessel body. These are from Bullard Brushed jars (see Suhm and Jelks 1962:21). The few brushed-incised and brushed-punctated sherds are likely also from Maydelle Incised vessels with incised lines or punctations made through the brushing marks. The proportion of utility ware sherds with brushing marks (24.6 percent) in the M. S. Roberts assemblage is consistent with mid-14th to mid-15th century ancestral Caddo occupations in the upper Neches River basin (see Anderson et al. 1974;Perttula 2011). Only after ca. A.D. 1400 do brushed sherds dominate Late Caddo period Frankston phase ceramic assemblages (Perttula 2011:162).
Several of the incised-punctated rim and body sherds (n=10, 7.2 percent of the utility wares) are from Maydelle Incised vessels (see Figure 8b-c, e) with either sets of diagonal incised lines forming incised tri-angles lled with punctations or diagonal incised panels lled with punctations. One lower rim-body sherd from a jar has an incised motif with horizontal, vertical, and sets of diagonal incised lines on the rim and rows of ngernail punctations on the vessel body (see Figure 8d). One interesting incised-punctated sherd from a vessel of undetermined type from the site has curvilinear incised zones lled with tool punctations (see Figure 8f).
The punctated sherds are from both ngernail and tool punctated vessels. These vessels are simply decorated with rows of punctations on the upper part (rim and likely upper body) of utility ware vessels. Punctated utility wares in upper Neches River basin sites have only the most basic decorative elements (Suhm and Jelks 1962:Plate 79a-b).
The ne ware sherds are from both engraved (n=21, 75 percent of the ne wares) and red-slipped (n=7, 25 percent) vessels (Table 4). The majority of the engraved sherds are from upper Neches River Poynor Engraved vessels (Figure 9a   Only one sherd (4.8 percent of the engraved sherds) from an engraved carinated bowl in the ne ware assemblage has a red ochre-rich pigment rubbed in the engraved design (see Figure 9c). The one engraved bottle sherd (see Figure 9h) is from a Poynor Engraved cylindrical-shaped vessel. It has sets of diagonal lines that may be part of a large triangle element, as well as another set of closely-spaced curvilinear engraved lines divided from other sets of engraved elements by single vertical or horizontal engraved lines (see Suhm and Jelks 1962:Plate 63a, e-f).
The proportion of red-slipped sherds-from both bowls, carinated bowls, and bottles-in the M. S. Roberts site ne wares is notable, as red-slipped sherds are not generally common at all in upper Neches River basin sites, or indeed in the Neches and Angelina river basins. Red-slipped ne wares (bowls, carinated bowls, and an occasional bottle) are a common part of ancestral Caddo ceramic assemblages in several parts of East Texas, most notably in sites in the middle Red River, the Big Cypress Creek basin, the upper Sulphur and Sabine River basin, and the middle Sabine River basin (Perttula 2015: Figure 3).

Ceramic Pipe Sherd
The single ceramic pipe sherd is from a bone-tempered pipe with a thick (14.2 mm in diameter) long stem, possibly an L-shaped elbow pipe (Perttula 2011:215 and Figure 6-23); its stem hole opening is 6.0 mm. This form of elbow pipe is the earliest elbow pipe style in the upper Neches River basin and has been found in ca. A.D. 1320 to ca. A.D. 1480 Middle Caddo period to Frankston phase components in the region (see Perttula et al. 2012:15).

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
The A. S. Mann (41HE7) and M. S. Roberts (41HE8) sites are ancestral Caddo sites in the Caddo Creek valley in the upper Neches River basin in East Texas. Both sites were investigated by archaeologists from the University of Texas in the early 1930s, and there are collections of artifacts from both sites held at TARL. This includes eight ceramic vessels from a single Caddo burial from the A. S. Mann site and more than 400 sherds from ceramic vessels from mound and habitation contexts at the M. S. Roberts site.
The eight vessels from Burial AF-1 at the A. S. Mann site are funerary offerings in a Frankston phase burial feature; a second burial feature (Burial AF-2) was nearby, but no funerary offerings were recovered from this burial in the University of Texas investigations. As best as can be determined from the few ceramic vessels that are decorated, and comparisons to other burial features in the upper Neches River basin, this burial occurred between ca. A.D. 1480-1560 and was that of an adult individual. This site is just one of many family cemeteries dispersed across the basin and along Caddo Creek.
In the case of the M. S. Roberts site, it is one of only a few known Caddo earthen mound sites in the upper Neches River basin, the most prominent being the A. C. Saunders site (41AN19) on the Neches River to the east (Jackson 1936;Kleinschmidt 1982). The mound at the M. S. Roberts site began as a 24 cm thick deposit of yellow sand built on an alluvial terrace, and an important structure was built and used (for ritual and political purposes, perhaps) there, then eventually burned. At that point the yellow sand mound ll and the burned structure deposits were covered with a more massive mound ll more than 1.1 m in thickness. The mound was set within a settlement of unknown size and character, and the archaeological evidence of its use is marked by a small assemblage of plain and decorated ceramic vessel sherds and a possible L-shaped elbow pipe sherd in the TARL collections. These artifacts suggest that the Caddo construction of the mound and occupation of the settlement took place sometime in the rst half of the 15th century A.D., and may have lasted until as late as ca. A.D. 1480, during the rst part of the Frankston phase. Radiocarbon dates from the site are needed to re ne the age of the Caddo occupation, and help establish when the mound feature was constructed, used, and then abandoned. At the present time, only a single Frankston phase mound is known: the A. C. Saunders site. The mound at the M. S. Roberts site may be the second mound site in a Late Caddo period Frankston phase community in the upper Neches River basin.