Ancestral Caddo Ceramic Assemblage from the Spoonbill Site (41WD109) in the Lake Fork Creek Basin, Wood County, Texas

Cite this Record Perttula, Timothy K. and Skiles, Bob D. (2016) "Ancestral Caddo Ceramic Assemblage from the Spoonbill Site (41WD109) in the Lake Fork Creek Basin, Wood County, Texas," Index of Texas Archaeology: Open Access Gray Literature from the Lone Star State: Vol. 2016, Article 22. https://doi.org/ 10.21112/.ita.2016.1.22 ISSN: 2475-9333 Available at: https://scholarworks.sfasu.edu/ita/vol2016/iss1/22


Introduction
Ancestral Caddo habitation sites are common in the upper Sabine River basin in East Texas, as well as along tributaries of the Sabine River, including Lake Fork Creek. In this article we discuss the ceramic vessel sherd assemblages from the Spoonbill site (41WD109) that was investigated in the area in the 1970s. The site is in the Lake Fork Creek basin in the immediate vicinity of Lake Fork Reservoir (Bruseth and Perttula 1981) (Figure 1).

Spoonbill (41WD109)
The Spoonbill site is an important multi-component Caddo settlement and cemetery on an upland of a circular house structure, several burial features (4+), and well-preserved plant remains (Bruseth and Perttula 1981;Perttula et al. 1982;Skiles 1981), mainly from work done in 1978. The second component is represented by a post-A.D. 1550 Titus phase cemetery with at least 14 burials; most of these burials were excavated in 1967 by J. A. Walters (Perttula et al. 2009), but one burial feature from this component was excavated in 1978 (Skiles 1981), and others had been previously dug by a local avocationalist (Marlon Weir).
There are a number of vessels from both Middle Caddo and Late Caddo period burials found in the same cemetery. The Middle Caddo period ceramic vessels include a red-slipped and punctated bottle (cf. Maxey Noded Redware), an interior and exterior engraved bowl (probably a Spoonbill Engraved vessel), a red-slipped incised-punctated bowl, two Monkstown Fingernail Impressed jars, an incised jar, two Spoonbill Engraved bowls, and three Sanders Engraved carinated bowls (Perttula et al. 2009 (Perttula et al. 2009;Bruseth and Perttula 1981: Table 5-10).
The ceramic assemblage from the Spoonbill site discussed in this article was collected in the late 1970s from surface contexts by Bob D. Skiles and James E. Bruseth. It consists of 197 sherds: 150 plain rim, body, and base sherds, and 47 decorated sherds; the plain to decorated sherd ratio is 3.19. All of the sherds are from grog-tempered vessels; one sherd (0.5 percent) has grog and bone temper.
(n=16, 34 percent) vessels (Table 1). Most of the utility ware sherds are from Canton Incised vessels with diagonal and diagonal opposed incised decorative elements (n=11, 35.5 percent of the utility wares) and sherds with tool or cane punctated rows (n=9, 29.0 percent). There are also four sherds with appliqued sherd, a sherd with horizontal brushing marks, and another sherd with parallel brushing marks adjacent to a row of tool punctations; the brushed and brushed-punctated sherds are likely from Bullard Brushed vessels. as Sanders Plain) vessels, and two of the engraved sherds (with cross-hatched and diagonal-horizontal decorative elements) are from Sanders Engraved vessels. The most distinctive of the engraved sherds are assemblage from the Spoonbill site.

Summary and Conclusions
The analysis of the ceramic vessel sherd assemblage from the Spoonbill site (41WD109) provides further archaeological evidence attesting to the substantial settlement of this part of East Texas by Caddo peoples during both the Middle Caddo (ca. A.D. 1200-1400) and Late Caddo (ca. A.D. 1400-16880) periware vessel sherds.
Middle Caddo period ceramic assemblages are present at the Spoonbill site. Previous excavations at a cemetery at the Spoonbill site have recovered comparable Sanders Engraved and Canton Incised vessels as funerary offerings, as well as Maxey Noded Redware, Spoonbill Engraved, and Monkstown Fingernail Impressed vessels. The Upper Sabine River Middle Caddo period sites do apparently share stylistic characteristics with Sanders phase sites on the middle Red River (Jackson et al. 2000;Perttula et al. 2015), and contemporaneous sites elsewhere in the upper and mid-Sabine River basin (Perttula 2015a;Perttula et al. 1993a).
Late Caddo period Titus phase ceramic vessel sherds are also present at the Spoonbill site from habitation contexts, and the site also has a Titus phase cemetery. The vessel sherds are from Ripley Neck Banded, Maydelle Incised, and McKinney Appliqued utility ware vessels. The burial features with associated ceramic vessel funerary offerings at the Spoonbill site include such types as Simms Engraved, Taylor Engraved, and cf. Womack Engraved, as well as Ripley Engraved, Wilder Engraved, and La Rue Neck Banded vessels (Perttula et al. 2009;Skiles 1981), that suggest these features are from a post-A.D. 1550 Titus phase component. Such components are common in both the Caney Creek (Bruseth and Perttula 1981;Perttula et al. 2009) and Dry Creek (Perttula 2005(Perttula , 2015a(Perttula , 2015b(Perttula , 2016a(Perttula , 2016bPerttula andSkiles 2014a, 2014b;Perttula and Walters 2016;Perttula et al. 1993b) drainages in the Lake Fork Creek drainage basin, and they include habitation sites-farmsteads and small hamlets-along with family cemeteries.