Article Title

The Kinsloe Site (41GG3) on Rabbit Creek in the mid-Sabine River Basin, Gregg County, Texas

Authors

Timothy K. Perttula, Heritage Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State UniversityFollow

Agency

Friends of Northeast Texas Archaeology

DOI

https://doi.org/10.21112/ita.2017.1.6

Abstract

The Kinsloe site (41GG3) is on Rabbit Creek in the middle Sabine River basin a few miles north of Kilgore, Texas. The site is ca. 2 km west of the confluence of Rabbit Creek and the Sabine River. This site is one of a number of late 17th to early 19th century Caddo sites that have been associated with the Kinsloe focus or phase first recognized by Buddy C. Jones (1968; see also Fields and Gadus 2012:639- 643; Perttula 2007), and affiliated with Nadaco Caddo groups. Jones (1968:29-47 and Figure 3) provides a detailed summary of the local avocational archaeological work that had been done at the Kinsloe site, and mentions surface collections he had obtained from several areas of the site; these surface collections are now at the Gregg County Historical Museum in Longview, Texas (see below).

The Kinsloe site was found by Magnolia employees in 1931 when an area of the Rabbit Creek floodplain and an alluvial fan/terrace was graded for the construction of pipelines and oil storage tanks (April 1931 letter from J. E. Pearce to A. T. Jackson, on file at TARL). A Mr. E. A. Fox, one of the employees, excavated 19 ancestral Caddo burials from the site by 1940, and several other individuals apparently excavated as many as 11 more burials there by that time. The collections obtained by Mr. Fox were later examined by Jones (1968) as part of his Master’s thesis on Kinsloe focus/phase sites in East Texas. Jones also defined four site areas, A-D, with the Historic Caddo burials in Area C on an alluvial fan, and Areas A, B, and D to the west, north, and south; Area A is on the alluvial fan, Area B is on a floodplain rise, and Area D is on a prominent alluvial terrace ca. 150 m south of Area C (see Jones 1968:Figure 3).

However, recent investigations of the records and collections at the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory at The University of Texas at Austin (UT-TARL) indicate that there had been work done at the Kinsloe site in 1937 and 1940 that Buddy C. Jones had not been aware of and had not mentioned in his 1968 Master’s thesis. I will discuss these investigations in the remainder of this article, as well as the ancestral Caddo material culture remains and European trade goods recovered in these investigations.

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