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Zoomorphic effigy pendants: An examination of style, medium, and distribution in the Caddo area
Abstract and Figures
Caddo zoomorphic effigy pendants were crafted from a wide variety of raw material, such as freshwater mussel shell, Busycon perversum (whelk) marine shell, animal bone, and various types of soft stone. They have been documented at contemporaneous hate Caddo (A.D. 1400-1700) sites along the Red River in northeast Texas, southwest Arkansas, and northwest Louisiana; the Black Bayou, Big Cypress Bayou, and upper Sabine River basins in northeast Texas; the Ouachita River in south-central Arkansas; and the Arkansas River in central Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma. This paper describes the development of a comprehensive corpus that investigates stylistic groups, differential raw material or medium utilized, and the spatial distribution of zoomorphic effigy pendants throughout the Caddo area. Results reveal north-south heterogeneity, suggesting the presence of broader traditional cultural narratives associated with a complex idea that is manifest regionally in distinct stylistic forms and linked to Caddo beliefs concerning Beneath World themes. Additionally, this stylistic and spatial analysis offers an additional dataset to further explore social, political, and economic linkages among and between contemporary Caddo groups around A.D. 1500.
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As part of on-going documentation of the Joint Educational Consortium’s Hodges Collection, 31 ceramic effigy vessels or vessel fragments are described. Most were dug by Thomas and Charlotte Hodges or Vere Huddleston in the 1930s-1940s from sites in the Middle Ouachita archeological region of southwest Arkansas. By documenting these vessels and what is known of their archeological contexts, we can better employ them in future analyses of regional variation, iconography, and interactions between the Caddo Area and the Mississippian Southeast.
Ceramic vessels and cosmological structure at first may seem quite unrelated. Many argue the basic and perhaps only function of a pot was a simple human-made container which held foodstuff for cooking and serving purposes. Pre-Contact communities also used ceramics to display complex iconography, some of which may represent important cosmological meanings in time and space. For this paper, I examine the temporal and spatial placement of pottery in 98 Craig Mound burials at the Spiro site in search for cosmological patterns in the imagery of the vessels. Only burials unassociated with the Great Mortuary and the Spirit Lodge were considered, because they have been seriously understudied. Spatial and temporal patterns that emerged from this study suggest burials outside of the Great Mortuary and the Spirit Lodge were also placed in specific areas of the Craig Mound to represent a cosmogram or a ritual display that expressed an important cosmological narrative.
The importance of the use of a Geographic Information System (GIS) in archaeological applications has been demonstrated previously. The value of using a GIS approach is an ability to conduct multivariate spatial analyses in order to visualize complex social relationships, interactions, and distributions across a broad cultural landscape. Within Caddo archaeology, the utilization of GIS functionality to explore spatial phenomenon has been employed in a variety of ways, such as site organization and interaction, material distribution and exchange, and environmental modeling and landscape reconstruction, to name a few. The following report adds to the growing list of GIS-based case studies in Caddo archaeology with preliminary results of an on-going project evaluating the distribution of visual imagery depicted on a select corpus of whole Caddo ceramic vessels.
Throughout the past several years, I have been compiling, with the help of several Caddo researchers, a comprehensive multi-state database primarily composed of whole Caddo vessels from published excavations, private collections, and archaeological reports. At present, the database contains over 13,000 vessel entries from over 500 sites ranging from a single vessel recorded at a site to hundreds. Over the years, the database has evolved to contain, where applicable, attribute fields on type, variety, motif designs (largely using the Glossary of Motifs published in the Spiro shell engravings, collegiate assignment, form, temper, decorative method (incised, brushed, etc.), context (burial #, site #, intra site location), pigment, archaeological phase, collector, repository, associated photographs, and reference citations. The database is managed using Microsoft Access where data are imported into ESRI ArcGIS and spatial analyses can be conducted. This is a continual, and perhaps never-ending, work in progress where attribute fields are added, types are vetted, and new sites are included. In some cases, “Caddo-like” vessels from sites outside the Caddo Archaeological Area, or Caddo Homeland, are included in order to evaluate social interaction and exchange of ideas. Through this process, some initial insights into landscape scale social interactions and interregional relationships using this growing comprehensive database have been explored.
Documentation and analysis of ceramic vessels in the Joint Educational Consortium's Hodges Collection has focused on reconstructing grave lots based on notes left by amateur archeologist Vere Huddleston in the 1930s and 1940s. Despite problems with the data, we can glean useful information from this collection. Here, l describe Caddo pottery and other artifacts in grave lots from eight sites in Clark and Hot Spring counties of west-central Arkansas. l then order the grave lots in time based on stylistic and technological characteristics (seriation) to re.ftne the ceramic chronology of the Middle Ouachita River valley and compare mortuary assemblages through time and across space.
A brief general balance about the knowledge of the freshwater mollusk fauna present in the Santa Catarina State/ SC territory after two complete decades of research, including notes on major regional environmental threats faced by human causes, is available (see pp. 29-32) ........
The first field report known of the native pearl mussel/ naiad "Diplodon expansus (Küster, 1856)" in the Highlands region of Santa Catarina State/ SC is available (see pp. 28-29) .......
This paper proposes a testable model to explore humanistic interpretations of landscapes that have been deliberately arranged, organized, executed, and modified based upon a particular suite of highly integrated political, social, economic, and ideological rules and aspirations about space. This model examines the landscape as a ritual object, embedded with cosmological meaning, purpose, and vision. Using data from archaeogeophysical surveys, excavations, and surface collections, some thoughts on organized space in the Great Bend region in southwestern Arkansas are presented with respect to regional site distributions, cardinal directionality, and intra-site spatial relationships as they exist across the cultural landscape.
The Middle Caddoan period in the Big Cypress Creek drainage basin has been based upon a synthesis of Thurmond's (1990) archaeological overview of the basin. Thurmond defines a transitional Caddoan period (dating ca. A.D. 1300-1400) from 14 sites that have ceramic assemblages combining Early Caddoan and Late Caddoan stylistic attributes. A review of these sites, along with additional information from recent archaeological investigations, suggests that the Middle Caddoan period in the Big Cypress Creek basin has an evolving cultural diversity that extends over a longer period of time, fitting well with Story's definition of the period as dating from ca. A.D. 1200- 1400. Although there is an absence of documented subsistence evidence and few radiocarbon dates (only seven from four sites), there are recognizable distinctions that may be made about Middle Caddoan period settlement patterns, mortuary practices, and the material culture record in the basin. Based on these observations, and the currently available archaeological record, 38 sites in the Big Cypress Creek drainage basin may now be classified as belonging to the Middle Caddoan period.
This article focuses on the seed beads recovered from the Spradley site (41NA206), a possible Nacogdoches village site located south of Nacogdoches, Texas, and compares the seed bead color pattern to that of other colonial period sites in the region, including Deshazo (41NA27), Stephens (41NA202), Pearson (41RA5), Gilbert (41RAI3), Roseborough Lake (41BW5), Vinson (41LTI), Womack (41LRI), 41H064, Atlanta State Park (41CS37), Ware Acres (41GG31), and the shipwreck of La Belle in Texas; and Los Adaes (16NA16) and Colfax Ferry (16NA15) in Louisiana. The possible meaning of different seed bead color patterns is briefly discussed.
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.
Back in August 1997, the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma had submitted a Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) claim for a cranium that had been obtained by the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City in 1877. Very little information was known about these remains, other than it had been obtained "as a purchase/gift" to the museum by Charles C, Jones Jr. and was "found in a mound" somewhere near the "Shreveport vicinity" in Caddo or Bossier Parish, Louisiana. "Based on the presence of artificial cranial deformation," the museum dated these human remains to a period of between A.D. 800 and the contact period. Because of the cranial deformation, and the archeological investigations that had taken place in the past in Louisiana, the museum had determined that the remains were culturally affiliated to the Caddo Nation. Through consultation with the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma and the Cultural Resources Office staff at the AMNH, in February 200 l the Notice of Inventory Completion was published for these human remains in the Federal Register.
Novaculite quarries in the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas and Oklahoma were created through largescale extraction of lithic raw materials, used for stone tools by Caddos and other Native Americans over the past 11,000 years and in recent centuries by Euro-Americans for whetstones. Quarry sites are characterized by surface features like large pits. trenches, battered boulders, and debris piles. This article summarizes the results of an Arkansas Archeological Survey research project that described and mapped surface features at one site (3GA22J to provide a better understanding of the problems and potential of documenting novaculite quarries.
Rare and often questionable occurrences of southwestern pottery and turquoise artifacts have been reported in northeastern Texas. These artifacts may mark major interaction networks. Both southwestern pottery and turquoise artifacts have been found at the Sanders site, which is located in the core distribution of these "erratics."
The use of a Geographic Information System (GIS) allows for dynamic visualizations in the analysis of spatial distributions and the modeling of data clusters and outliers. An ongoing analysis of Foster Trailed-Incised vessels found within the Caddo Homeland seeks to construct a distributional framework that can be applied and compared to additional Caddo ceramic types and site location attributes using a GIS database. Preliminary results show high frequencies of Foster Trailed-Incised vessels along the Ouachita and Red River drainages as well as along the Saline, Arkansas, and Little Missouri rivers in Arkansas. Additional possible varieties of Foster Trailed-Incised have been identified in Caddo, Ouachita and Morehouse parishes in Louisiana and at Caddo sites in northeast Texas. While a full analysis of the distribution of Foster Trailed-Incised vessels (and relationships with other Caddo vessel types) is far from complete, initial conclusions are presented in this article.
Examples are taken from the northwest coast of North America and the southeast Nuba of Sudan to demonstrate the significance of the link between content and form in art, treating aesthetic traditions as knowledge or ideological practices. -after Author