Article Title

Documentation of Additional Vessels from the Johns Site (41CP12), Camp County, Texas

Authors

Timothy K. Perttula, Heritage Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State UniversityFollow
Bo Nelson, Heritage Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State UniversityFollow
Mark Walters, Heritage Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State UniversityFollow

Agency

Journal of Northeast Texas Archeology

DOI

https://doi.org/10.21112/.ita.2010.1.21

Abstract

The Johns site (41CP12) is a Titus phase cemetery in the Prairie Creek valley in the Big Cypress Creek stream basin of the Northeast Texas Pineywoods. The Caddo artifacts from the site are from the Robert L. Turner, Jr. and Tommy John collections. Both men are current residents of Camp County, Texas.

total of 35 Late Caddo (ca. A.D. 1400-1680), Titus phase, burials were excavated between May 1966 and December 1984 at the Johns site. The first 19 burials were excavated by Tommy Johns and Robert L. Turner, Jr., and Johns continued to excavate burials at the site until 1984. No single map of the plan of the Johns site cemetery exists in the available notes, but enough information is provided to reconstruct the arrangement and extent of the burial interments. The burials occur in a number of east-west rows, with the head of the deceased oriented almost always to face to the west. The deceased were placed in long, narrow, and relatively deep burial pits in an extended supine position, with funerary offerings generally placed along both the sides of the body and at the feet. Funerary offerings consisted of ceramic vessels (3-16 vessels per burial), ceramic pipes, arrow points (usually in quivers), celts, smoothing stones, as well as scrapers and other chipped stone tools. All of the burials have ceramic vessel funerary offerings, but only a small proportion had either ceramic pipes (25.7% of the burials), arrow points (62.9% of the burials), celts (17.1% of the burials), or other stone tools (17.1% of the burials) placed in the burial pit.

In the summer of 2009, the Robert L. Turner, Jr. vessel and pipe collection and the Tommy Johns collection of vessels, pipes, celts, and arrow points were fully documented from the Johns site. A detailed description of each ceramic vessel or ceramic pipe was made for documentation purposes, accompanied by drawings appended to vessel documentation forms (on file, Archeological & Environmental Consultants, LLC files in Austin, Texas), where needed, of ceramic vessel decorative motifs or pipe morphology to supplement the artifact descriptions. Analysis notes and photographs were also obtained on the arrow points, celts, and other stone artifacts from a number of burials in the Johns collection.

A total of 277 ceramic vessels were documented in the Turner and Johns collections from the Johns site. Subsequent to the completion of the published report, Tommy Johns located six additional vessels from the Johns site cemetery in his collection, and these vessels were documented in January 2010. This article provides information on the six previously undocumented vessels from the Johns site, increasing the total number of vessels to 283.1

With the larger sample of 283 vessels, the vessels from the Johns site are dominated by engraved fine wares (68.1%). Utility wares comprise 25.5% of the ceramic vessel mortuary offerings, and plain wares another 6.4%.

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