Correspondence between George T. Wright and A. T. Jackson Regarding Late 1930s-Early 1940s Excavations at the Sam Kaufman Site (41RR16)

Abstract

In the 1930s and 1940s George T. Wright was a landowner (Kiomatia Plantation) and Vice-President of the Kiomitia Mercantile Company: General Merchandise in Kiomatia and Paris, Texas. He was also an avid Indian artifact collector at sites along the Red River in Red River, Texas, and also dug at sites he knew in the area, including the Wright Plantation site (41RR7), which he owned, and the Sam Coffman site (now known as Sam Kaufman, 41RR16, and for a short time known as the Arnold Roitsch site), a few miles downstream along the Red River. Both sites are large ancestral Caddo mound and village sites. Little professional archaeological work has ever been conducted at the Wright Plantation site, but there have been a number of archaeological investigations in mound (East and West mounds), habitation, and burial features at Sam Kaufman since the 1950s. The site was occupied by Caddo peoples as early as ca. A.D. 1000 to as late as the early 18th century. Between 1941-1942, Wright was engaged in considerable correspondence with Alvin T. Jackson (1895-1974), a newspaperman turned archaeologist for The University of Texas at Austin (UT). Jackson worked for UT from 1929-1942, after which he spent about 13 years working for the Austin Railway System. Jackson apparently met Wright in 1931 when UT was investigating the Sanders site (41LR2) in Lamar County, Texas. The correspondence on file at the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory at The University of Texas (TARL) between Jackson and Wright concerned investigations Wright and friends had recently been involved in at the Sam Coffman site. This work has not been previously discussed in the archaeological literature regarding the Sam Kaufman site, but is presented herein because it sheds new light on the archaeology of the site, especially the archaeology of the East Mound.