The Consideration of the Caddo Area in “Food Production in Native North America: An Archaeological Perspective”

Timothy Perttula

doi:10.21112/ita.2019.1.31

Abstract

Kristen J. Gremillion has written “a highly selective survey of Native North American food production systems from an archaeological perspective,” with a particular focus on plant food production in the Eastern Woodlands and the Southwest. The time frame of the book spans the period from ca. 3000 B.C. to post-European contact, extending up to ca. A.D. 1800. The archaeological evidence for plant food production in the Caddo Archaeological Area of Southwest Arkansas, Northwest Louisiana, eastern Oklahoma, and East Texas is mentioned by Gremillion, but only rather briefly in her chapter entitled “the Rise of the Three Sisters: Maize in the Eastern Woodlands.”

Highlights

This article is available in Index of Texas Archaeology: Open Access Gray Literature from the Lone Star State: https://scholarworks.sfasu.edu/ita/vol2019/iss1/31
The archaeological evidence for plant food production in the Caddo Archaeological Area of Southwest Arkansas, Northwest Louisiana, eastern Oklahoma, and East Texas is mentioned by Gremillion (2018:72), but only rather briefly in her chapter entitled “the Rise of the Three Sisters: Maize in the Eastern Woodlands.”
Gremillion’s map extends the Caddo Area all the way to the Gulf of Mexico and well west into what would be prairie natural regions in North Central and Central Texas. Her discussion of food production in the Caddo Area is only a single paragraph, and relies on the results of stable isotope analyses of ancestral Caddo peoples (i.e., Rogers 2011; Wilson and Perttula 2013; Perttula et al 2014) rather than a consideration of the macrobotanical remains recovered from flotation samples at ancestral Caddo sites

Summary

Introduction

This article is available in Index of Texas Archaeology: Open Access Gray Literature from the Lone Star State: https://scholarworks.sfasu.edu/ita/vol2019/iss1/31. The archaeological evidence for plant food production in the Caddo Archaeological Area of Southwest Arkansas, Northwest Louisiana, eastern Oklahoma, and East Texas is mentioned by Gremillion (2018:72), but only rather briefly in her chapter entitled “the Rise of the Three Sisters: Maize in the Eastern Woodlands.”

Results

Conclusion