Article Title

Documentation of Ancestral Caddo Ceramic Vessels and Other Artifacts from East Texas Sites in the George T. Wright Collection at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History

Authors

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

Agency

Friends of Northeast Texas Archaeology

DOI

https://doi.org/10.21112/ita.2018.1.3

Abstract

From the early 1900s to the mid-1940s George T. Wright was a landowner (Kiomatia Plantation) and Vice-President of the Kiomitia Mercantile Company: General Merchandise in Kiomatia and Paris, Texas. He was also an avid Indian artifact collector at sites along the Red River in Red River County, Texas, as well as in McCurtain County, Oklahoma, especially the collection of Caddo ceramic vessels, and also dug at sites he knew in the area, including the Wright Plantation site (41RR7), which he owned, and the Sam Coffman site (now known as Sam Kaufman, 41RR16, and for a short time known as the Arnold Roitsch site), a few miles downstream along the Red River. Most of these vessels were described as coming from the sandy banks of the Red River.

After George T. Wright died in 1944, his family sold his collections to the University of Oklahoma, where they are now part of the collections held by the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History (SNOMNH). His collection included 722 ceramic vessels, as well as ceramic pipes, arrow points, and various other kinds of artifacts. There is a notebook prepared by Wright in the SNOMNH holdings that we were able to review and glean some information from. It provides his numerical listing of artifacts, a few with specific provenience information—including County as well as B. R. R. (burial, Red River County), S. R. R. (surface, Red River County), B. L. (burial, Lamar County), and B. Titus (burial, Titus County)—as well as simple descriptions of each specific artifact, such as “pot,” “red pot,” and “bottle.”

Our interest in this report is in documenting the George T. Wright Collection of artifacts from East Texas Caddo sites in Red River, Lamar, and Titus counties. The majority of these collections are from burial features at sites in these counties, and almost 90 percent of the vessels are from the Wright Plantation and Sam Kaufman sites.

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