A Cache of Maud Arrow Points and Other Artifacts from the Jim Clark site, Red River County, Texas

Abstract

In the winter of 2010, I was contacted by Robert Perino, son of the late Greg Perino, a well-known archaeologist who had worked extensively since the late 1960s along the Red River in southwest Arkansas, southeastern Oklahoma, and northeast Texas in the Caddo archaeological area. According to Robert Perino, Greg Perino had found a cache of 30 Maud arrow points at the Jim Clark site in Red River County, Texas, in 1975, and recorded the discovery in a journal, along with a ground stone celt and a ceramic vessel. It is not known with certainty if this cache was associated with a Caddo burial eroding out of the site, but it seems likely that this is the case, as burials are common in Caddo sites along the river in various archaeological contexts, and that these artifacts were all that were either exposed, or remained, of a particular disturbed burial. The purpose of this article is to put these findings on record, in the hope that they provide a measure of useful information for those studying the native history of the Caddo peoples that lived along this section of the Red River before A.D. 1700. The discovery of the cache has not been previously reported in the Caddo archaeological literature, and the Jim Clark site itself has not been formally recorded. Its exact location was not noted by Greg Perino in his journal , but it is likely that it is along a Red River alluvial terrace or natural levee not far from the Bentsen-Clark site (41RR41) (or perhaps even part of it), as a portion of that Early and Late Caddo period cemetery and village site is on land owned by Jim Clark. Other prehistoric Caddo sites in the immediate vicinity of the Bentsen-Clark site that have been recorded include 41RR74 and 41RR75, although whether these sites have Caddo burials, or when they were occupied in the Caddo era, is not known. The Rowland Clark site (41RR77) is only a few miles upstream on the Red River.