The Northern Caddoan Area was not Caddoan

In this paper I will challenge one of the major unexamined assumptions in the archeology of Eastern North America, the assumption that the Arkansas River Valley and Ozark Highland regions of eastern Oklahoma and western Arkansas, the so-called northern Caddoan Area, was the home of Caddo people who were closely related culturally and linguistically to the Caddo people of southwest Arkansas, northwest Louisiana, east Texas, and southeast Oklahoma. I will propose, instead, that the archeology of this locality is much more complex and interesting than the conventional wisdom would have it. What is involved here, I suggest, is not one region but parts of three, with three culturally and biologically distinct populations. Furthermore, I will propose that Spiro, the key site in this locality, is actually two sites, one Caddoan, the other Mississippian

A Summary of the History of the Caddo People

I am pleased and very honored that you have invited me here today to tell you something about the past of the Caddo people as it is known to archaeologists. This is a subject that has been both my occupation and my major preoccupation for more than 25 years. The story that I and other archaeologists have been piecing together over many years is long, complex, and endlessly fascinating. It is a heritage that anyone could be proud of. Let me give you some of the highlights. The story began over 11,500 years ago--or about 9,500 B.C.--when the first people arrived in the historic Caddo territory of Northwest Louisiana, Southwest Arkansas, East Texas, and Southeast Oklahoma. There were not many of them, perhaps only a hundred or so in this whole area at first. And the world they lived in was very different from the world today. It was cold, about like northern Maine or northern Michigan today, with forests of spruce and birch, because the Ice Age was still going on. They were probably dressed like Eskimos in carefully sewn parkas, trousers, and boots. We know this because many of the stone tools they left behind are tools for preparing hides and for making the bone needles necessary to sew them into clothing. They probably lived in skin tepees like those of the historic Plains Indians, but smaller, because they did not have horses to carry their gear from place to place. They did have dogs and they probably trained them to work as pack animals

Deconstructing the Sanders Focus and the Sanders Phase : A Reply to Perttula Regarding the Taxonomy and Significance of the So-called Sanders Focus, or Sanders Phase, Pottery of Northeast Texas and Southeast Oklahoma

Perttula is correct in pointing out that there are numerical errors in a recently published table of mine. A revised version is presented here as Table 1. Although several of these errors are numerically large and might have caused problems had they gone uncorrected, Perttula is not correct in suggesting that they are serious in the sense that they have affected the conclusions I reached based on the table, the insinuation being that they weaken my Sanders entrepot hypothesis. They do not. That hypothesis is part of the reinterpretation of the archeology and bioanthropology of the Arkansas Valley and the Red River Valley which I have been developing for more than eight years. It could hardly be weakened by errors in this table which is simply a compilation of the pottery of the five so-called Sanders focus/phase types reported from the list of sites with probable Sanders phase components recently proffered by Bruseth, Wilson, and Perttula

Coles Creek Culture and the Trans-Mississippi South

Certain Lower Mississippi Valley (LMV) traits, mostly Coles Creek ceramic traits, but also traits such as temple mounds and certain mortuary patterns, appear at Late Fourche Maline and Early Caddo sites in the Trans-Mississippi South, particularly at sites in the Red River Valley in northwest Louisiana and southwest Arkansas. Explaining how these traits got there and understanding their role in the development of Caddo culture is one of the basic problems in the archaeology of this area. The conventional explanation has long been that they represent a full scale intrusion of Coles Creek culture into the Trans-Mississippi South. Thus Michael Hoffman has created a Crenshaw phase of Coles Creek culture in the Great Bend region of the Red River Valley in southwest Arkansas, and Clarence H. Webb attributed the initial major occupation at the Mounds Plantation site in northwest Louisiana to Coles Creek peoples who laid out the plaza, possibly constructed Mound 2 as a quadrilateral temple substructure, and--at the opposite end of the plaza--established a burial area where Mound 5 sits

The Development of the Burial Mound Tradition in the Caddo Area

This is a significantly revised version of a paper I presented at the 1994 East Texas Archeological Conference in Tyler, Texas. The gist of that paper was that the origins of the burial mound tradition in the Caddo area can be traced, not to the Coles Creek culture in the Lower Mississippi Valley as the conventional wisdom would have it, but to an independent Fourche Maline mound building tradition that developed in and around the Red River Valley beginning about 100 B.C.2 I still think that there was an independent Fourche Maline mound building tradition and I still think that, as I tried to show in my conference presentation, the earliest mounds at the earliest Caddo ceremonial center we know of, Mounds D and C at the Crenshaw site, were constructed in that tradition. As I will show in this paper, it is clear that the Crenshaw mounds were not Coles Creek mounds. But in the three years since my conference presentation, I have changed my interpretation of the slightly later, late Fourche Maline period, full-fleshed, group burials that were also found in Mound Cat Crenshaw. These are the earliest graves found so far at any Caddo site that seem to be clearly in the tradition of the distinctive, high status shaft tomb burials of early Caddo culture in the Red River Valley. In my original presentation I argued that these graves, and hence the early Caddo mound burial tradition, could be derived from the old Fourche Maline burial mound tradition. But since then I have come to consider that argument unconvincing and untenable. The new argument I offer here is that the stimulus for the early Caddo mound burial pattern did indeed come from outside the Caddo Area, as many archeologists have suggested, but it was not from Coles Creek culture as has commonly been supposed. I now think that these graves indicate the point in time when powerful influences from the Emergent Mississippian cultures to the northeast of the Caddo Area, perhaps from Cahokia itself, were beginning to transform the centuries-old Fourche Maline burial mound tradition into the essentially Mississippian early Caddo burial mound tradition. This transition must have entailed not just changes in the Fourche Maline burial mound tradition but also basic changes in the structure and importance of the elite stratum, if such there was, in Fourche Maline society itself. Thus, these graves would reflect an early stage in the transformation, under Emergent Mississippian influence, of the evidently still quite weakly developed elite social stratum in late Fourche Maline society into the well defined elite stratum that seems to have dominated early Caddo society; i.e., the social elite responsible for the deep, richly accoutered shaft tombs that were emplaced in mounds at all the important early Caddo ceremonial centers. So in this paper I will first attempt to isolate and describe the old Fourche Maline burial mound tradition. Then I will try to show that the earliest mounds at Crenshaw were built in that tradition. Finally, I will try to show how that tradition was interrupted and significantly altered around A.D. 800, and I will argue that the Emergent Mississippians were behind this transition

Selection-Independent Generation of Gene Knockout Mouse Embryonic Stem Cells Using Zinc-Finger Nucleases

Gene knockout in murine embryonic stem cells (ESCs) has been an invaluable tool to study gene function in vitro or to generate animal models with altered phenotypes. Gene targeting using standard techniques, however, is rather inefficient and typically does not exceed frequencies of 10−6. In consequence, the usage of complex positive/negative selection strategies to isolate targeted clones has been necessary. Here, we present a rapid single-step approach to generate a gene knockout in mouse ESCs using engineered zinc-finger nucleases (ZFNs). Upon transient expression of ZFNs, the target gene is cleaved by the designer nucleases and then repaired by non-homologous end-joining, an error-prone DNA repair process that introduces insertions/deletions at the break site and therefore leads to functional null mutations. To explore and quantify the potential of ZFNs to generate a gene knockout in pluripotent stem cells, we generated a mouse ESC line containing an X-chromosomally integrated EGFP marker gene. Applying optimized conditions, the EGFP locus was disrupted in up to 8% of ESCs after transfection of the ZFN expression vectors, thus obviating the need of selection markers to identify targeted cells, which may impede or complicate downstream applications. Both activity and ZFN-associated cytotoxicity was dependent on vector dose and the architecture of the nuclease domain. Importantly, teratoma formation assays of selected ESC clones confirmed that ZFN-treated ESCs maintained pluripotency. In conclusion, the described ZFN-based approach represents a fast strategy for generating gene knockouts in ESCs in a selection-independent fashion that should be easily transferrable to other pluripotent stem cells