The latest issue of the Kadohadacho News is out! Click the link to see about recent goings-on in Southwest Arkansas archeology!
The first Kadohadacho News of 2015 is out!
The first edition of the Kadohadacho News for 2015 is out! Check it out for information on fieldwork at Dooley’s Ferry, Caney Cemetery, and the Samuels-Turner House, as well as an announcement of our upcoming speaker!
Kadohadacho News, December 2014
Here is the Kadohadacho News for December of 2014!
Highlights include:
- Mapping at Fort Lookout, Ouachita County
- Excavations at the Manley-Usrey site, Mississippi County
Our December chapter speaker will be incoming station archeologist Dr. Carol Colaninno-Meeks. Join us at 7:00 in Bruce 104 on Tuesday, December 9. It’s our potluck meeting, so bring a dish and welcome our new staffer!
Kadohadacho News for October 2014
Hi Folks!
The Kadohadacho News for October is out, though a few days late (sorry). Give it a look, and I hope to see you all on Tuesday night as we hear from Dr. Emily Beahm on the Castalian Springs site in Tennessee.
Manuscript Monday: Jeter et al’s Overview of the LMV
Today’s Manuscript Monday is an important overview of Arkansas (and Louisiana) archaeology. Well, the southern portion of Arkansas, at least. Jeter et al’s (1989) Archeology and Bioarcheology of the Lower Mississippi Valley and Trans-Mississippi South in Arkansas and Louisiana. I’ve been using this a lot in working on the final report of last February’s fieldwork at Wallace’s Ferry, in Phillips County. Though that site is in eastern Arkansas, this book is relevant to this neck of the woods as well, and bears the marks of Frank Schambach’s heavy contributions to the work. It is one of the most recent summaries of the region’s prehistory.
Copies are available at Magale Library at SAU as well as the Barton Library in El Dorado.
Manuscript Monday: Whittaker’s “Flintknapping”
For this week’s Manuscript Monday, I’m going back to my roots. I earned my undergraduate degree at Grinnell College, a tiny but rigorous liberal arts college adrift in a sea of Iowa corn. It was a wonderful place to learn, and I met my wife there, so… double-win!
My instruction at Grinnell was primarily under the supervision of two wonderful people, Dr. Kathryn Kamp and, most closely, Dr. John Whittaker. Dr. Whittaker was and is a great professor, and a good mentor. He also valued highly learning how to make and use the things we as archaeologists excavate. We experimented with making clay pots, dabbled in balanophagy (preparing and eating acorns), threw atlatls ALL THE TIME, and often met on Friday afternoons to flintknap. That’s right, the time when most schools might see their students head towards any number of early parties or other activities, we Grinnell archaeologists would get together and break rocks into stone tools and projectile points. It was ridiculously fun, except for that day we tried window glass… so much blood.
Dr. Whittaker is an expert in flintkapping, carefully reducing select pieces of stone into spear points, scrapers, arrowheads, and myriad other tools. His book, Flintknapping: Making and Understanding Stone Tools (University of Texas Press, 1994), lays out some of the rudiments of the art and what that means for archaeologists interested in understanding excavated examples. It is accessible to non-specialists, and sprinkled with colorful anecdotes.
Flintknapping is available at SAU’s Magale Library, as well as other libraries in the region. Click here to see where you might find the book near you.
Manuscript Monday: La Vere’s “The Caddo Chiefdoms”
Today, we’re looking at David La Vere’s The Caddo Chiefdoms: Caddo Economics and Politics, 700-1835 (University of Nebraska Press, 1998).
This book covers a little over a millennium of Caddo history, from what archaeologists believe is the formation of the group around 800 AD up until the breakup of Caddo communities and dislocation of Caddo people from their homeland in the 1830s-1850s. An ambitious stretch of time, no? La Vere covers the ground well, though, but not uniformly.
La Vere works through the archaeologically-known history (basically, everything before about 1650) relatively quickly, focusing heavily on the middle-1600s to middle-1800s; the period for which there are historical documents. He chronicles the interactions between the Caddo and French and Spanish colonial authorities, emphasizing the importance of the former as both businesspeople in the deerskin and bear oil trades and as political brokers. That eminence erodes rapidly when American settlers come to the area. We meet salient leaders, such as Tinhiouen the Elder, Tinhiouen the Younger, and Dehahuit, and learn about interactions with both allied Native American groups (Wichita and Comanche) and antagonists (Choctaws, Apaches, and [especially] the Osage). La Vere evocatively underscores the importance of familial connections, both biological and adoptive, in Caddo exchange networks, and how some colonial groups (the French) worked within this system, some (the Spanish) did not, and others (Americans) basically used it as leverage before dismantling it.
The book is highly-readable, and a good parallel work to F. Todd Smith’s The Caddo Indians: Tribes at the Convergence of Empires, 1542-1854. La Vere is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington.
The book is available from Magale Library at Southern Arkansas University (call number E99.C12 L3 1998) just as soon as I return it and it gets re-shelved. It can also be found at the libraries of Henderson State University, Ouachita Baptist University, Barksdale Air Force Base, LSU-Shreveport, and Centenary College.
Let’s Give Manuscript Mondays a Whirl
We’ve been trying a number of weekly social media events on the Facebook pages of various Arkansas Archeological Survey (ARAS) stations. “Throwback Thursday,” a wide-ranging phenomenon across the Book of Faces, has been used for showing off images from past fieldwork. In the past year or so, some of our stations have been contributing to “What Did We Find Wednesdays,” showing interesting or evocative finds.
These two basically show data collection (fieldwork) and analysis (artifacts). But, what of the final stage of archaeological research, reporting results? Let’s address that with a new section, which to continue the trend of alliterative titles, which I’m dubbing “Monograph Mondays.”
Some guiding principles
- The work can be a book, journal article, or piece of gray literature, but it should be quality work and an important contribution to our understanding of the past in your respective research areas. These can be, but don’t have to be, the “master works” for local areas. If it’s interesting, write a blurb about it.
- The material should be available to the general public in some way shape or form. If it’s a book, it should at least be available in the library of your station’s host institution. If it’s gray literature, it should be available from a source such as DTIC (for Department of Defense reports).
- Preference should be given to works that you don’t need three PhDs and a spare brain to understand.
- While giving some idea of what the work is about, you don’t need to give a full report on it. A little taste will suffice
Now it’s up the flagpole. Let’s see if anyone decides to salute.
June Rambles for the ARAS-SAU Crew
June is a busy month for the Arkansas Archeological Survey. Each year, we help run the Arkansas Archeological Society’s annual Training Program dig, a 2.5 week-long excavation on some important site, somewhere in the state. The Society Dig, as we call it, rotates around the state, and was last in our neck of the woods in 2011-2012, when we dug at Block Six, in Historic Washington State Park (Hempstead County). This year, it was at site 3MN298, a Caddo/pre-Caddo site up in Montgomery County, near Mt. Ida. Both Dr. Brandon and Dr. Drexler were in attendance, helping Dr. Mary Beth Trubitt (ARAS-HSU Station Archeologist) and Mr. Meeks Etchieson (U.S. Forest Service) with the digs. Several Kadohadacho Chapter members, including Bob Campbell, Kelly Schnell, and Don Hall, were in attendance.
Dr. Brandon taught the class on ceramics, playing to a room full of very experienced Society members, which kept him on his toes. This is the seventh different class that Dr. Brandon has taught at a Society Dig, suggesting that he is banned by the cosmos from ever repeating a course. In another ten years, we may have him teaching archaeoastronomy, just to ensure that his streak continues. While not teaching ceramics, Dr. Brandon was out at Area V, assisting Vanessa Hanvey (ARAS-HSU Station Assistant) with excavations there.
During the first week of the dig, Dr. Drexler taught the Basic Excavation course, working on three 2x2m units (see photo) with 12-13 students, most of whom were eager, enthusiastic college students or recent graduates. Dr. Don Bragg helped out as an unofficial teaching assistant, and proved to be invaluable. Though the Basic Ex units were supposed to be relatively quiet (one doesn’t want to jump into a really complex area when just learning how to dig), each of the units encountered some interesting feature… or features (they averaged over five features per unit by the end). These included a possible hearth, a maze of post holes, and a large storage pit. We even found excavation pits and auger holes from the first fieldwork at the site, back in the 1980s, allowing us to tie this archaeological research in with preceding efforts. Given that we were under instructions to recover all feature fill as flotation samples, we trucked dozens of bags of soil out of the site every day, which boggled the mind of Dr. Jeff Mitchem (ARAS-Parkin), who served as lab director, and gave Dr. Elizabeth Horton (ARAS-Toltec) more than enough to keep her flotation tanks running each day.
Since getting back, Dr. Brandon has continued his preparations to move to Fayetteville and take up his new position as UAF Station Archaeologist. Today is, actually, his last official day as SAU Station Archaeologist, and we wish him all the best in his new opportunity.
Dr. Drexler spent the bulk of the week following the dig assisting Dr. Horton at Toltec Mounds State Park. We laid out a grid over a proposed septic tank litchfield in preparation for Dr. Jami Lockhart’s (ARAS-CSP) upcoming survey of the area. We also established the basic footprint of Dr. Horton’s new garden, which will show park visitors the kind of things that the occupants of Toltec would have been cultivating. Keep an eye on this effort over the coming years!
Horton to talk about Iconography in the Sacred & Ceremonial Textiles and Basketry of Southeastern Indians
When: April 8, 2014, 7pm
Where: The Magnolia Room, second floor of the Reynolds Center on the SAU Campus, Magnolia, AR
The final speaker in our spring series will be Dr. Elizabeth Horton—the AAS Research Station Archeologist at Toltec Mounds State Park. Dr. Horton will be the last speaker to tackle our 2013-2014 theme: iconography. Given her research interest in prehistoric plant usage in the southeastern United State, it will come as no surprise that she will be tackling iconography as seen in preserved textiles and basketry in her talk entitled “God Baskets & Ancestors’ Shrouds: Motifs and Iconography in the Sacred & Ceremonial Textiles and Basketry of Southeastern Societies.”
While sites such as the Ozark Plateau Bluffshelters in Arkansas and Spiro Mounds in Oklahoma have long been known for yielding remarkably well-preserved textiles and basketry, these materials have largely not been given much attention in Southeastern archaeology. Horton’s research focuses on the production, use, and stylistic aspects of these perishable materials. This talk defines the social and ceremonial roles of select types of textiles and basketry, and integrates them into a broader body of Southeastern iconographic research that includes ceramics, rock art, and other media.
Dr. Horton became the AAS-TMRS Archeologist in 2011, but she had been working in Arkansas for some time before that. She completed her Ph.D. in at Washington University in St. Louis in 2010 with an Arkansas‐related dissertation topic—The Ties that Bind; Prehistoric Fabric Production and Fiber Use in the Ozark Plateau.
Come hear about iconography, plants, fabric and the prehistoric women who made them on Tuesday, April 8th, 7:00pm in the Magnolia Room on the second floor of the Reynolds Center on the campus of Southern Arkansas University.