Article Title

Spiroan Entrepots at and Beyond the Western Border of the Tans-Mississippi South

Authors

Frank Schambach, Arkansas Archaeological SurveyFollow

Agency

Caddo Archeology Journal

DOI

https://doi.org/10.21112/.ita.1993.1.8

Abstract

Although this paper is primarily a reinterpretation of the Sanders site in the Red River Valley in northeastern Texas, that reinterpretation will make no sense unless I first outline, very quickly, the new paradigm for the archeology of the Arkansas Valley in eastern Oklahoma and western Arkansas upon which it is based.

For the last five years, as I am sure most of you know, I have been challenging the standard interpretation of the archeology of the Arkansas Valley in eastern Oklahoma and western Arkansas--the Northern Caddoan Area paradigm. I have done this on the grounds that there is no documentary evidence and no archeological evidence for a Caddoan connection of any sort other than trade. In my view the basic biological and cultural ties of this tradition, which I call the Arkansas Valley tradition, were, as Bell has speculated, to the east with peoples of the Central and Lower Mississippi Valley, not to the south with the Caddoan area or to the west with the Wichita. I suspect, as I have said before, that this tradition was a part,at least, of the long lost ancestral Tunican tradition.

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