Continued Shovel Test Investigations at the Historic Caddo Allen Phase Bowles Creek Site (41CE475), Cherokee County, Texas

The Bowles Creek site (41CE475) on Bowles Creek in the Neches River basin in East Texas (Figure 1) is an important and well-preserved Historic Caddo Allen phase habitation site on a low alluvial rise not far north of the current channel of Bowles Creek (Perttula and Stingley 2016, 2017; Perttula et al. 2016). This article summarizes the archaeological findings from the February 2016 excavation of 18 additional shovel tests (ST 40-48 and ST 50-60) at the site, placed between 10-25 m north of the Bowles Creek channel, and excavated in an attempt to clarify the subsurface character and depth of the archaeological deposits in this part of the site given the recovery of ancestral Caddo sherds from 100-140 cm bs in the Bowles Creek cut bank (Perttula and Stingley 2017)

Additional Material Culture Remains from the Bowles Creek Site (41CE475) in Cherokee County, Texas

The Bowles Creek site is on a low alluvial rise in the Bowles Creek floodplain; Bowles Creek is a southward-flowing tributary of the Neches River. Stingley found the site in early 2015 during a surface walk over, when Caddo ceramic sherds were noted in a number of gopher mounds. He excavated a number of shovel tests (n=13) and three units (generally 1 x 1 m in size); the units were excavated to between 50-80 cm bs. The site covers at least an estimated 55 m (east-west) x 20 m (north-south) area. The initial archaeological investigations at the Bowles Creek site recovered 617 ceramic sherds, of which 461 were decorated. The plain to decorated sherd ratio in the assemblage was 0.34. Almost 69 percent of the sherds were from utility ware jars, including sherds from Bullard Brushed, Spradley Brushed-Incised, Killough Pinched, and Lindsey Grooved vessels, and ca. 91 percent of the sherds from the site were from grog-tempered vessels, including sherds from vessels tempered with both grog and bone. Approximately 10 percent of the sherds were from bone-tempered vessels. Sherds from both Patton Engraved (n=4) and Poynor Engraved (n=6) vessels were present in the Bowles Creek site fine wares, along with one trailed sherd. The character of the recovered ceramics from the site suggest the ancestral Caddo occupation dated after ca. A.D. 1650, in the Allen phase, although the occurrence of both Poynor Engraved and Patton Engraved sherds in the assemblage may indicate that the site was also used by Caddo peoples sometime before A.D. 1650, perhaps between ca. A.D. 1560-1650 in the latter part of the Frankston phase. A single radiocarbon date has been obtained on a piece of animal bone from Unit 3, 40-50 cm bs, at the site. The radiocarbon age of one AMS sample from the Bowles Creek site is 410 + 24 years B.P. (D-AMS 11799), or A.D. 1540 + 24. The 2 sigma calibration (95 percent probability) of this radiocarbon age, using IntCal13, is A.D. 1525 + 84. This result further suggests that there are Frankston phase (ca. A.D. 1400-1650) archaeological deposits preserved at the site. An additional sample of material culture remains from the Bowles Creek site was obtained by Stingley in July and August 2015, primarily from areas recently disturbed by wild hogs. These remains are the subject of this article

Archaeological Investigations at the Walnut Branch (41CE47), Ross I (41CE485), and Ross II (41CE486) Sites, Cherokee County, Texas

The Walnut Branch site (41CE47) was recorded by George Kegley and Dan Witter in 1969 as part of an archaeological survey funded by the Texas Building Commission (now the Texas Historical Commission) in Cherokee County and adjacent counties. This ancestral Caddo site is located about six miles southwest of the city of Rusk, in the Box’s Creek valley in the Neches River basin; Box’s Creek is a generally southern-flowing tributary to the Neches River, and enters the river not far to the westnorthwest of the George C. Davis site (41CE19), otherwise known as Caddo Mounds State Historic Site. The landowner’s son had previously collected ceramic sherds and a ceramic pipe from the Walnut Branch site, and a Caddo burial (and associated ceramic vessel, about which nothing is known) had been found at the site in 1964. Kegley obtained surface collections of ceramic sherds and lithic tools from different parts of the Walnut Branch site, including a number of ceramic sherds (n=69) and one tool fragment from the Walnut Branch stream bed, a tributary to Box’s Creek; at that time, the bank of the stream was actively eroding, exposing artifacts on the surface. Kegley also excavated two small “test pits” or shovel tests at the site, and they contained a small number of ceramic sherds in the archaeological deposits. The sediments in those “test pits” had different zones of alluvial sands to a depth of at least 58 cm. In 2017, the junior author obtained permission to reexamine the Walnut Branch site, and determine its current condition and research significance. This work consisted of an intensive program of shovel testing across a large field and floodplain north of Walnut Branch and east of Box’s Creek, which is discussed below. He also obtained a substantial collection of ancestral Caddo ceramic vessel sherds from the Walnut Branch stream bed just below the Walnut Branch site and the Ross I site; this surface collection was taken before the shovel testing work was initiated. The intensive shovel testing has demonstrated that the large pasture that contains the Walnut Branch site also contains two other spatially related ancestral Caddo sites (Ross I, 41CE485 and Ross II, 41CE486) to the west and northeast, respectively, of the Walnut Branch site; the findings from these other sites will also be discussed in this article

Ancestral Caddo Ceramic Vessels from East Texas Sites Held by the Gila Pueblo Museum from 1933 to 2017

In the summer of 2017, 21 ancestral Caddo ceramic vessels held since 1933 by the Gila Pueblo Museum and then by the Arizona State Museum were returned to the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory at The University of Texas at Austin (TARL). These vessels had not been properly or fully studied and documented when the University of Texas exchanged these vessels, so our purpose in documenting these vessels now is primarily concerned with determining the stylistic (i.e., decorative methods, motifs, and decorative elements) and technological (i.e., vessel form, temper, and vessel size) character of the vessels that are in the collection, and assessing their cultural relationships and stylistic associations, along with their likely age. In 1933, little was known about the cultural and temporal associations of ancestral Caddo ceramic vessels from East Texas, but that has changed considerably since that time

Results from Magnetic Gradient Surveys at the Walnut Branch (41CE47), Ross I (41CE485), and Ross II (41CE486) Sites in Cherokee County, Texas

The use of magnetic gradient surveys at Caddo sites located throughout the Caddo people’s ancestral lands within the current areas of East Texas, Southwest Arkansas, Northwest Louisiana, and eastern Oklahoma has been very successful in the elucidation and mapping of the distributional characteristics of buried cultural features. In March 2018, three Caddo sites in East Texas (41CE47, 41CE485, 41CE486) were surveyed and the results add to the growing corpus of remote sensing spatial data. The recent survey work was conducted in order to assess the nature of sub-surface preservation of archaeological deposits in different environmental and historical contexts and to map the distribution of geophysical anomalies attributed to the Caddo occupations. The following presents results and preliminary interpretations

Historic Caddo Archaeological Sites in Cherokee County, Texas

The historic archaeology of the Caddo Indian peoples in East Texas has been the subject of considerable interest by Caddo archaeologists for a number of years. Much of that interest has been focused on the investigation of the effects of European contact on Caddo cultural traditions and practices, particularly the impact of introduced European epidemic diseases, and the impact of Spanish, French, and American colonization efforts. In recent years, another focus of Historic Caddo archaeological investigations has been on characterizing the material culture record of the different clusters of Caddo Indian sites in East Texas, most notably the study of the diversity in the decorative styles and technologies of their hand-made ceramic vessels as clues to identifying clusters of ethnically and socially related communities in the Angelina and Neches River basins that were living in the region after the mid-17th century A.D. Herein, we discuss the archaeological findings from four Historic Caddo sites in the Bowles Creek basin in Cherokee County, Texas, that have ceramic assemblages that help to better characterize the nature of what has been defined as Neche cluster sites; “a cluster is strictly a group of possibly related sites in close geographic proximity to each other” suggests that certain sites in the middle Neches River basin (and the Bowles Creek valley) are affiliated with the Neche Caddo groups, and the sites described in this article may well belong to the Neche cluster

Current Research: Recent Documentation of Ceramic Vessels and Other Funerary Objects in the Titus Phase Cemetery at the Tuck Carpenter Site, Camp County, Texas

Recently, we had the opportunity to complete the documentation of Late Caddo period Titus phase ceramic vessels and other funerary offerings from the Tuck Carpenter site (41CP5) in the Big Cypress Creek basin in Camp County, Texas. This portion of the funerary assemblage from the site has been in the hands of R. W. Walsh since the 1960s. Unable to properly care for the assemblage, he recently donated his collection to an anonymous individual, who graciously allowed us to fully document these funerary offerings. The Tuck Carpenter site (41CP5), on Dry Creek several miles from its confluence with Big Cypress Creek, is perhaps the best known Titus phase cemetery in the Big Cypress Creek basin in East Texas. This is due to the careful analysis and reporting of the recovered funerary offerings and remains from 45 burials excavated by Robert L.Turner and R. W. Walsh between 1963-1967. More than 95 percent of the graves had the bodies of single individuals laid in an extended supine position on the floor of the pit, but two burial features had two individuals placed side by side in the burial pit

Analysis of the Recovered Artifacts from the Controlled Surface Collection at the Peach Orchard Site (41CE477), Cherokee County, Texas

The Peach Orchard site is one of several historic Caddo archaeological sites recently recorded by Kevin Stingley in the Bowles Creek drainage in the middle Neches River basin in Cherokee County, Texas. The Peach Orchard site had been exposed in erosion along a county road that bisects the southern end of the upland landform, while the remainder of the landform was primarily grass-covered when it was first recorded earlier in 2015. In November 2015, the landowner decided to shallowly plow the site area to improve its grass cover, and this plowing provided an opportunity to complete a surface collection of the site area from November to December 2015

Renewed Archaeological Investigations at the Bowles Creek (41CE475), Cornfield (41CE476), and Peach Orchard (41CE477) Sites in the Bowles Creek Valley, Cherokee County, Texas

There are a number of Allen phase Historic Caddo sites on Bowles Creek (Figure 1), a southwardflowing tributary to the Neches River in the East Texas Pineywoods, including the Bowles Creek (41CE475), Cornfield (41CE476), and Peach Orchard (41CE477) sites (Perttula and Stingley 2016a, 2016b; Perttula et al. 2016). In conjunction with remote sensing investigations conducted by Dr. Duncan P. McKinnon (University of Central Arkansas), renewed archaeological investigations have been completed in January 2016 at these three sites to better understand the subsurface character of their archaeological deposits. At the Bowles Creek site, on a low alluvial rise, the first investigations included a surface collection, along with the excavation of a number of shovel tests (n=13, generally 35-40 x 55-60 cm in width and length and 30-50 cm in depth) as well as three units (Units 1-3, generally 1 x 1 m in size) done by Stingley at the site; the units were excavated to between 50-80 cm bs (Perttula et al. 2016). These initial archaeological investigations at the Bowles Creek site recovered 617 ceramic sherds (Perttula et al. 2016:Table 13), of which 461 were decorated. A single radiocarbon date has been obtained on a piece of animal bone from Unit 3, 40-50 cm bs, at the site. The radiocarbon age of this AMS sample from the Bowles Creek site is 410 + 24 years B.P. (D-AMS 11799), or A.D. 1540 + 24. The 2 sigma calibration (95 percent probability) of this radiocarbon age, using IntCal13 (Reimer et al. 2013), is A.D. 1525 + 84. This result suggests that there are also Frankston phase (ca. A.D. 1400-1650) archaeological deposits preserved at the site. An additional sample of material culture remains from the Bowles Creek site was obtained by Stingley in July and August 2015, primarily from areas recently disturbed by wild hogs (see Perttula and Stingley 2016:Figure 2). This surface collection recovered another 337 ceramic sherds, including 206 decorated sherds (Perttula and Stingley 2016a:Table 1). There were also a small number of unburned animal bones and teeth in this surface collection, as well as a gray novaculite Cuney arrow point. The Cornfield site is on an upland ridge between Bowles Creek and Turkey Creek, and is known as the 1870s cornfield of an Anglo-American settler on this tract of land. In the only archaeological work at the site before the investigations reported on herein, a 2 acre area of the landform was recently plowed and disked, and archaeological evidence of a Caddo settlement was obtained from a surface collection (Perttula et al. 2016). The surface collection had 227 ceramic vessel sherds, including 156 decorated sherds (Perttula et al. 2016:Table 5). The first work at the Peach Orchard site consisted of a general surface collection from the grass-covered upland landform (Perttula et al. 2016). That work recovered 71 ceramic sherds, 60 of which were decorated (Perttula et al. 2016:Table 9). In November 2015, the landowner decided to shallowly plow the site area to improve its grass cover, and this plowing provided an opportunity to complete a comprehensive surface collection of the site area from November to December 2015. After the site area and the larger field had been plowed and rained on several times, a grid of 21 10 x 10 m units (numbered 1-21) was laid out over the known surface spatial distribution of ancestral Caddo ceramic sherds (Perttula and Stingley 2016b:Figures 2 and 3). The systematic surface collection recovered 2102 ceramic vessel sherds, 1496 of which were decorated, two ceramic elbow pipe sherds, a clay coil, two burned clay pieces, 12 chipped stone tools (including two dart points from a Woodland period component), 67 pieces of lithic debris, one core, one fire-cracked rock, four animal bones, and 14 mid-nineteenth to early 20th century historic artifacts (Perttula and Stingley 2016b). Based on the distribution of the major categories (i.e., total sherds, and the distributions of utility ware and fine ware sherds) of ancestral Caddo artifacts across the site, the core area with the highest density of all categories of Caddo artifacts is in a 700 square meter area in the central and eastern part of the surface collection grid (Perttula and Stingley 2016b:Figure 4)

The Garden Site (41CE480) on Bowles Creek, Cherokee County, Texas

Recent archaeological investigations in the Bowles Creek Valley in the Neches River basin in East Texas (Figure 1) have identified a number of ancestral Caddo habitation sites (Perttula and Stingley 2016a, 2016b, 2017; Perttula et al. 2016). The Garden site (41CE480) is another of these Caddo sites, and was probably a farmstead occupied by one or a few families for a generation or two. The Garden site is on a grass and tree-covered upland ridge (385 feet amsl, Figure 2a) between the Turkey Creek and Bowles Creek valleys; Turkey Creek is west of the site and flows south to merge with Bowles Creek about 1.4 km south of the site. Lithic and ceramic artifacts have been noted on the surface over a ca. 900+ square meter area of the landform