Documentation of Ceramic Vessels and Projectile Points from the C. D. Marsh Site (41HS269) in the Sabine River Basin

A total of at least eight Caddo burials were excavated at the C. D. Marsh site on Eight Mile Creek, a southward-flowing tributary to the Sabine River, by Buddy C. Jones in 1959-1960. This includes Burial 1, an historic (dating after ca. A.D. 1685) Nadaco Caddo burial; European trade goods found with this burial include two small silver disks. The other burials (Burials 2-8) are part of an earlier Caddo cemetery that is thought to be associated with the ca. A.D. 1350-17th century Pine Tree Mound community along the Sabine River and its tributaries. Jones suggests that these latter burials are from a ca. A.D. 1200-1500 Caddo cemetery. According to Jones and notes on file at the museum, Burials 2-8 are located ca. 120 m east-southeast from the one Historic Caddo burial at the site. The burials were placed in extended supine position in north-south oriented pits in rows, with the head of the deceased at the southern end of the burial and facing north. Funerary offerings included ceramic vessels and mussel shells. In this article, we describe eight ceramic vessels in the Gregg County Historical Museum collections from Burials 1, 4, and 7, as well as projectile points from habitation contexts at the C. D. Marsh site; the location of Burial 7 relative to Burial 4 is not known. There are also six other ceramic vessels from the ca. A.D. 1200-1500 burials at the site that are unassociated funerary objects in the Gregg County Historical Museum collections. This includes one vessel each from Burials 5 and 8; the provenience of the other vessels at the site is unknown. One of the unassociated funerary object ceramic vessels at the C. D. Marsh site is a Ripley Engraved, var. McKinney carinated bowl. Such vessels would not be expected in a ca. A.D. 1200-1500 Caddo cemetery, and although this type of fine ware is commonly seen on post-A.D. 1600 Titus phase sites in the region, it is rarely found in association with European trade goods. Therefore, it may represent a burial from a third temporal component (ca. A.D. 1600-1685) at the site

The Pipe Site, a Late Caddo Site at Lake Palestine in Anderson County, Texas

Buddy Calvin Jones excavated a Late Caddo cemetery and midden site he called the Lake Palestine site, in Anderson County, Texas, in March 1968. His notes indicate that a total of 21 Caddo burials were excavated at the site, and the burials were situated primarily around a midden of unknown dimensions. Jones\u27 notes do not specify how many of the burials he excavated at the Pipe site, but one photograph in the records suggests he excavated at least three, one burial of which is the focus of this article

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

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%

Rowland Clark and Dan Holdeman Site Human Skeletal Remains

The Rowland Clark site was occupied by Caddoan Indian groups from approximately A.D. 1300-1600+. Twenty one of the 39 burials recovered during the Museum of the Red River excavations were assigned to the earliest McCurtain phase occupation (ca. A.D. 1300-1450); 14 burials were ascribed to a later McCurtain occupation between ca. A.D. 1450 and 1600; four burials belonged to the final McCurtain occupation (ca. A.D. 1600+) of the site. Since infants and children were buried under house floors rather than in the cemetery area associated with each time period, their interment does not necessarily follow the assigned time period. Due to poor preservation and small sample sizes all burials were evaluated as a single Caddoan population. The burials from the Dan Holdeman site were found in a mound and three cemetery areas located on a terrace adjacent to the Red River. Skeletons of 26 individuals were recovered. The remains of an additional 15 individuals could not be retrieved due to their poor preservation. The acidity of the soil at the site contributed to considerable disintegration of the bones, leaving all burials in fragmentary condition. Three time periods are represented in the burials from the Dan Holdeman site. Burials 22, 23, and 25 were associated with a Formative Caddoan occupation (that Perino designated the Spiro Focus) dating about A.D. 1000. Interments corresponding with the Middle Caddoan Sanders Focus, dated about A.D. 1200, include Burials 1-20 and 24. One subadult, Burial 21, dates to the latter portion of the McCurtain phase (ca. A.D. 1650). The skeletal material that could not be retrieved represented individuals living during the Formative and Middle Caddoan occupations. Since much of the data on the osteoarcheology of the Clark and Holdeman sites has been presented in Loveland, specifically stature estimates, skeletal anomalies, and caries rates, it is the purpose of this appendix to summarize other aspects of the skeletal biology of the prehistoric inhabitants of the two sites. However, the poor condition of the skeletons recovered from the sites precludes accurately assessing the biological condition and adaptive efficiency of the people who lived at the site. However, the analyses presented here, and in Loveland, present data that provides a fairly complete picture of Caddoan adaptive efficiency on the Red River in Northeast Texas

The Stover Lake Site (41BW8) on the lower Sulphur River, Bowie County, Texas

The Stover Lake site (41BW8) is an ancestral Caddo cemetery and habitation site on a natural alluvial rise in the Sulphur River floodplain, about 1.6 km east of the Lake Wright Patman dam. In 1961-1962, several collectors excavated at least 19 Caddo burials at the site and also gathered a collection of sherds from habitation contexts. Notes on the burials and their funerary offerings were provided by the collectors to the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory at The University of Texas at Austin (TARL), and 390 ceramic sherds and one stone gorget from non-burial contexts were donated to TARL by one of the collectors, Janson L. McVay

The Southern Frontier of the Meroitic State: The View from Jebel Moya

The site of Jebel Moya, excavated in the early twentieth century, represents arguably the largest pastoral mortuary complex in Africa. Jebel Moya is resituated in relation to the neighbouring Meroitic-era agro-pastoral settlements and the only known Meroitic trading station (Sennar) in the southern Gezira Plain, Sudan. It is the first time that the known localities in the southern Gezira and southern Meroitic cemeteries have been compared, in an attempt to elucidate the different social organisation reflected in mortuary assemblages between the core and the periphery of the Meroitic State. New questions are posed for (1) the applicability of mortuary theory to pastoral cemeteries, and (2) the nature of zones of interaction on the frontier of the Meroitic State, through the application of new statistical and spatial analyses of the mortuary assemblages and the site’s reinterpretation as a pastoral, instead of an agro-pastoral, mortuary complex

The excavation of Non Ban Jak, Northeast Thailand - A report on the first three seasons

Non Ban Jak is a large, moated site located in the upper Mun Valley, Northeast Thailand. Excavations over three seasons in 2011-4 have revealed a sequence of occupation that covers the final stage of the local Iron Age. The site is enclosed by two broad moats and banks, and comprises an eastern and a western mound separated by a lower intervening area. The first season opened an 8 by 8 m square on the eastern mound, while the second and third seasons uncovered part of the low terrain rising into the western mound, encompassing an area of 25 by 10 m. The former revealed a sequence of industrial, residential and mortuary activity that involved the construction of houses, kiln firing of ceramic vessels and the interment of the dead within residences. The latter involved four phases of a late Iron Age cemetery, which again incorporated house floors and wall foundations, as well as further evidence for ceramic manufacture. The excavation sheds light on a late Iron Age town occupied at the threshold of state formation

An Anglo-Saxon execution cemetery at Walkington Wold, Yorkshire

This paper presents a re-evaluation of a cemetery excavated over 30 years ago at Walkington Wold in east Yorkshire. The cemetery is characterized by careless burial on diverse alignments, and by the fact that most of the skeletons did not have associated crania. The cemetery has been variously described as being the result of an early post-Roman massacre, as providing evidence for a ‘Celtic’ head cult or as an Anglo-Saxon execution cemetery. In order to resolve the matter, radiocarbon dates were acquired and a re-examination of the skeletal remains was undertaken. It was confirmed that the cemetery was an Anglo-Saxon execution cemetery, the only known example from northern England, and the site is set into its wider context in the paper

Effigy Vessel Documentation, Caddo Collections at the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory at The University of Texas at Austin

Ceramic vessels from ancestral Caddo sites in East Texas are diverse in form, size, manufacture, and decoration, both spatially and temporally. Variation in these attributes, including vessel form as well as any attachments, also “is connected with particular local and regional traditions” (Brown 1996:335). To both appreciate and understand the meaning of vessel form diversity in Caddo vessel assemblages in East Texas—or any other part of the much larger southern Caddo area—the consistent identification of different vessel forms and vessel shapes is crucial. The formal identification of the diverse vessel forms and vessel shapes, in conjunction with other vessel attributes, most notably decorative motifs and elements, present in Caddo vessel assemblages should contribute to delimiting the existence and spatial distribution of communities of Caddo potters that were sharing or not sharing ceramic practices and traditions in both short-term and long-term spatial scales, and illuminating small or expansive networks of social groups tied together through regional interaction. In this study, the focus is on ceramic effigy vessels from Caddo sites in East Texas that are in the collections at the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory at The University of Texas at Austin (TARL). Ceramic effigy vessels are a very rare vessel form found on Caddo sites, as they comprise about 1 percent of the more than 3100 Caddo vessels currently in the TARL collections. Three different effigy bowl shapes have been identified in East Texas Caddo vessel assemblages. The differences primarily resolve around the character of the effigy head (both bird and abstract forms) as well as the nature of any other appendages, such as tab tails and tail riders. The effigy bowls themselves are simple in form, with rounded body wall contours