Testing and Data Recovery Excavations at 11 Native American Archeological Sites Along the U.S. Highway 271 Mount Pleasant Relief Route, Titus County, Texas Volume II

Abstract

Register of Historic Places and State Antiquities Landmark testing of 11 prehistoric sites that will be impacted by construction of the proposed U.S. Highway 271 relief route around Mount Pleasant in Titus County, Texas. The work was done in 2005 for the Texas Department of Transportation’s Environmental Affairs Division under Contract No. 575XXSA006, Work Authorization No. 57501SA006. This research design provides support for a scope of work for testing, prepared as a separate document. The primary relevant historic context for future work on this project is The Development of Agriculture in Northeast Texas Before a.d. 1600 (Kenmotsu and Perttula 1993). Significant information on all nine study units defined for that context (chronology and typology, settlement systems, subsistence systems, social and political complexity, demographic change, mortuary practices, local and extralocal trade and exchange, technological change, and material culture) may be recovered. The overall project goal is to identify and explore Caddo community structure, with an emphasis on behavior and how people interacted and organized space at different spatial scales, including within single houses, on individual house lots, within villages, between one or more contemporaneous villages, and as villages and other components of the settlement system (e.g., field houses, mounds, cemeteries, agricultural fields, ceremonial centers).