Archaeological Investigations at the Wade (GC-38) and Estes (GC-49) Sites in the Sabine River Basin, Gregg County, Texas

Abstract

Buddy C. Jones conducted extensive archaeological investigations in the 1950s and 1960s at many sites in the mid-Sabine River basin of East Texas, especially on Caddo sites of various ages in Gregg, Harrison, and Rusk counties. However, that work has not illuminated our understanding of the archaeology of the Caddo Indian peoples that lived along this stretch of the Sabine River as much as it could have, primarily because little of the work completed by Jones was ever published, or the results and findings shared with professional and avocational archaeological colleagues working in the region. The Caddo archaeology of the Gregg County stretch of the Sabine River, in particular, is poorly known by comparison with the archaeological record in the upper Sabine River or to the archaeological studies recently completed downstream in Harrison County at sites such as Pine Tree Mound (41HS15). To begin to develop a better appreciation of the Caddo archaeology in the mid-Sabine River basin, we have made a concerted effort to analyze and document collections obtained by Jones from Caddo sites in Gregg County and the surrounding region. In this article, we discuss the archaeological findings from the Wade and Estes sites discovered and investigated by Jones in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The sites are near each other in the southeastern part of Gregg County. The Wade site is on a landform near the confluence of Peatown Creek and Dutchman Creek, northern-flowing tributaries to the Sabine River. The Estes site is on a large alluvial terrace on the north side of the Sabine River, across from the confluence of Dutchman Creek and the Sabine River This article focuses particularly on the excavations of portions of an ancestral Caddo house structure at the Wade site and the analysis of the substantial decorated sherd assemblages at both the Wade and Estes sites.