Late Caddo Ceramics from 41HE337 in Henderson County, Texas

Site 41HE337 is a Late Caddo settlement located on the north side of Caddo Creek, an eastward-flowing tributary to the Neches River, and just west of the city of Poynor, in Henderson County, Texas. Bill Young, an avocational archaeologist living in Corsicana, Texas, has a substantial collection of Caddo ceramic vessel sherds from the site. He gave his permission to study and document these materials as part of a broader study I am engaged in of post-A.D. 1300 Caddo ceramic traditions in the upper Neches River basin of East Texas.


Late Caddo Ceramics from 41HE337 in Henderson
County, Texas

Timothy K. Perttula
Site 41HE337 is a Late Caddo settlement located on the north side of Caddo Creek, an eastward-flowing tributary to the Neches River, and just west of the city of Poynor, in Henderson County, Texas. Bill Young, an avocational archaeologist Jiving in Corsicana, Texas, has a substantial collection of Caddo ceramic vessel sherds from the site. 1 He gave his permission to study and document these materials as part of a broader study I am engaged in of post-A.D. 1300 Caddo ceramic traditions in the upper Neches River basin of East Texas (Perttula 2008).
Proportionally, almost 70% of the sherds are plain wares, but this undoubtedly includes some plain body sherds and bases from the undecorated portions of the decorated utility wares and fine wares.
To reduce the ambiguity of sherd proportions because of the mix of plain vessel sherds and plain portions of decorated vessel sherds that may be present in the plain wares, a better comparison of the proportions of the different ceramic wares in the Caddo assemblage is the relative frequency of rim sherds (see Table 1 ). In this case, 29% of the rims are from plain vessels, another 37.5% are from utility wares (jars or bowls decorated with wet-paste designs, i.e., vessels decorated before firing), and the remaining 33.3% are from engraved or lip notched fine wares. On this basis, the proportion of the three wares at 4IHE337 is quite comparable.

Plain wares
As the rim sherd proportions discussed above indicate. plain vessels comprise a significant proportion of the ceramic vessel sherds from 41 HE337, including almost 30% of the rims. These plain wares appear to be from simple bowls-either smoothed and/or burnished on one or both vessel surfacesthat would have been used by the Caddo for holding and serving foods, most likely for individual use rather than communal use.

Decorated Utility wares
Overall, brushing is the most common fom1 of decoration in the 41 HE33 7 utility wares, comprising 43% of the utility wares (see Tahle 1 ). However. none of the hrushed sherds are rims, strongly suggesting that brushed decorations in this assemblage are contined to the body of jars; the rims of those jars are most likely decorated with non-brushed elements, among them incised, incised-punctated, and punctated elements (see Table 1 ), as well as occasionally also being brushed. Brushing on vessel bodies tend to he vertically-oriented or with parallel brushing marks (90%) if the orientation is uncertain, but overlapping (2% ), and opposed (8%) brushed body surfaces are also noted in the 41HE337 assemblage.
One sherd has parallel brushing on it, along with at least one row of tool punctations that have been pushed through the brushing. This kind of hmshedpunctated decoration is relatively common in post-A.D. 1350 Caddo ceramic assemblages in the Neches and middle Sahine river basins of East Texas.
Sherds with incised decorations (n=28) comprise 23% of the utility wares. One Maydelle Incised rim has diagonal opposed lines (Figure la), a second Maydelle Incised rim has diagonal incised lines, while another rim has a vertical incised panel (Figure lg). Body sherds have sets of parallel incised lines (n=8), opposed incised lines (n=4), crosshatched incised lines (n=3 ), and a single straight incised line (n=lO).
One incised-punctated body sherd is from a jar with diagonal incised lines on the rim and tool punctates on the vessel body. Two others have a single straight incised line framing a zone of fingernail punctates (see Figure If), and a third with a single straight incised line frames a zone of tool punctations.
Four of the nine incised-punctated sherds are rims of Maydelle Incised vessels; 67% of these sherds employ tool punctations as part of the decorative element. Two of these have incised triangles encircling the rim, and the triangles are either filled with tool punctations (see Figure 1e) or circular punctations (see Figure 1 b); a body sherd also has a triangular incised zone filled with tool punctations. A third rim has diagonal incised panels filled with tool punctates (see Figure 1c), and the fourth has large and small curvilinear incised zones filled with tool punctates (see Figure 1 d).
The 28 punctated sherds (23% of the utility wares), among them two rims, include 10 (36%) with rows of fingernail punctates and 18 (64%) with tool punctated rows; the proportion of tool versus fingernail punctation as part of the decorative element is almost exactly the same as seen in the incised-punctated utility wares. There is a single Killough Pinched body sherd in the 41 HE337 assemblage.
Two body sherds ( 1.6%) have straight appliqued ridges on them. These ridges are probably oriented vertically on the body of cooking jars, where their purpose was to divide the body into panels.

Fine Wares
There are three kinds of fine wares at 41 HE337: sherds from engraved vessels; sherds from redslipped bottles and bowls (n=2, 7.1%); and lip notched carinated bowl rims (n=l, 3.6%) (see Table  1 ). The engraved sherds account for 89% of the fine wares. The vast majority of the engraved wares from the site are from Poynor Engraved (see Suhm and Jelks 1962) carinated bowls, with decorative motifs encircling the rim panel.
One of the rims from a carinated bowl has a series of horizontal engraved lines, a second has both horizontal and opposed lines (Figure 2b), while another has a hatched triangular zone along one side of an oval-shaped area (Figure 2h). Two others only have diagonal engraved lines on the rim. One rim peaked vessel has both a hatched triangular element (i.e., the quintessential Poynor Engraved decorative element) adjacent to an oval or semi-circular area that is bisected by a series of diagonal engraved lines (Figure 2g Two other sherds have only hatched triangles. One other, from a carinated bowl, has hatched triangles at the end of a scroll element (see Figure 2d). The last remaining carinated bowl engraved sherd from 41 HE337 has horizontal engraved lines and a circle element.
There is only a single bottle sherd in the engraved fine ware sherd sample from 41 HE337. This has an excised triangle clement pendant from a straight line.
Red-slipped sherds in the 4IHE337 ceramic assemblage are from two different vessels. The first is a red-slipped (on both interior and exterior vessel surfaces) bowl or carinated bowl, and the second is from a bottle with an exterior red slip. In general, red-slipped vessels are rarely seen in post-A.D. 1300 upper Neches River basin Caddo sites.
The one lip notched rim (inverted rim with a beveled lip) has a regular series of notches cut into the lip. Examination of a large series of whole vessels from the upper Neches River basin suggests that lip notching (usually accompanying an engraved design on the rim panel) was a minor decorative element principally in post-A.D. 1480 Frankston phase contexts (Perttula 2008), but it has also been found in earlier habitation contexts in the basin, including among the ceramic sherds in the northern area ceramic tradition is the reliance by Caddo potters on the use of grog as the principal tempering aplastic (Perttula 2008). Such is the situation in the ceramic assemblage at 41HE337, where only 5.6% of the ceramic vessel sherds have bone temper inclusions (Table 2). Only the plain wart:s (i.e., bowls usrd in food serving) and decorated utility wares (i.e., used in cooking and storage tasks) at the site have bonetempered vessels.

CONCLUSIONS
The range of decorative clements and motifs in the utility ware and fine ware vesst:l sherds from 41HE337, as well as the infrequent use of bonetempering in vessel manufacture, indicate that the prehistoric ceramic vessel sherds here arc twn, , 15 1 h century Frankston phase occupation. The character of this assemblage is consistent with other documented Caddo sites in the upper Neches Riwr basin that are part of a distinctive post-A.D. 1300 ceramic tradition.
In particular, the ceramic vessel assemblage from 41 HE337 includes a number of plain ware vessel sherds, as well as decorated utility wares and fine wares. The utility wares are dominated by incised and incised-punctated Maydelle Incised jars, some of which had been brushed on the vessel body, as well as tool or fingernail punctated jars. There is one Killough Pinched body sherd. The fine waresincluding one engraved bottle sherd, two red-slipped sherds, and a well-executed lip notched rim-are dominated by Poynor Engraved carinated bowl sherds, as is the case at all upper Neches River basin Frankston phase sites. These vessels have panels of engraved ovals, semi-circles, and nested triangles, as well as distinctive hatched triangle elements. ENDNOTE 1. No arrow points or chipped stone tools were found at the site by Bill Young (May 2008 personal communication). There were a few small flakes, the base of a Dalton point, and a Gary point made of Uvalde gravels quartzite. There were also a very few tiny pieces of nondiagnostic bone.