Historic Caddo Archaeological Sites in Cherokee County, Texas

Abstract

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.