Odd little pot with four, spiked handles.
Nash Neck Banded jar, Late Caddo, ca. A.D.
1400-1650. TARL collections.
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This olla has a short neck with a flaring
rim and a small mouth. These features
suggest that it served as a water jar or dry
storage jar that could be sealed by tying a
skin cover over the mouth. Hodges Engraved
olla, Late Caddo, ca. A.D. 1400-1600. TARL
collections
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Example of the use of white pigment
(probably kaolin) to fill the engraved
lines, thus heightening the contrast with
bright red bowl. Ripley Engraved bowl, Late
Caddo, ca. 1400-1650. TARL collections.
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Small engraved bottle with highly unusual
"spiked gaping mouth." Taylor Engraved
bottle, Late Caddo, ca A.D. 1400-1650. TARL
collections.
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Looking down into small triangular engraved
bowl. Untyped, Late Caddo, ca. A.D.
1400-1650. TARL collections. Click on image
for enlarged view and alternative view.
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Hodges Engraved bottle with unusual oblong
form and pairs of nodes at both ends. Late
Caddo, ca. A.D. 1400-1650. TARL collections.
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Miniature pottery probably made for
children. Untyped, Historic Caddo, after
A.D. 1650. TARL collections.
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These decorated jars are believed to have
been made at the Brazos Reserve in the
1850s. These two and another similar pot are
in the Brooklyn Museum and were collected by
medical doctor. The vessel form and
decorative designs are immediately
recognizable as Caddo in origin and probably
derived from one of the Kadohadacho groups.
They show that the fine ware tradition
survived into the mid-1850s. Drawn by Nancy
Reese. From Perttula, 2001.
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Why Study Caddo Pottery?
Why do the archeologists who study the
ancient Caddo spend such an inordinate amount of time
and effort excavating, reconstructing, and studying
Caddo pottery? For archeologists, Caddo pottery is the
prime evidence used to identify and date ancient traces
of the Caddos' past. Lacking potsherds, we could
scarcely identify the vast majority of Caddo
archeological sites as being Caddo. While there are many
other distinctive kinds of archeological evidence of
Caddo life, such as house patterns, pottery remains
indispensable for understanding the past for three main
reasons.
First, the ancient and early historic
Caddo were superb potters and made and used lots of
pottery. Sites representing small farmsteads where a
single family once lived for short durations will have
hundreds of potsherds. Villages and ceremonial centers
often have tens or hundreds of thousands of potsherds
and, in graves, many whole or almost whole pots.
Secondly, pottery is relatively durable and can often be
identified by style and form even when broken into small
fragments. Thirdly, Caddo pottery is tremendously
varied—different forms or shapes, different decorative
designs, different colors, different finishes, different
sizes, and so on. Further, pottery styles and
preferences changed through time and varied from place
to place within the Caddo Homeland. Given the right
sherd, an expert often can tell approximately where the
pottery was made and how old it is, give or take a few
centuries (or sometimes a few decades). This is because
we know what whole Caddo pottery vessels look like.
The Caddo pottery tradition was tied to
the Caddo funerary tradition of placing whole pottery
vessels in the graves of departed loved ones. The
vessels may have contained food and drink to accompany
the deceased in the afterlife or they may have been
prized personal possessions (or both). Some burial
pottery is obviously worn from use, but other vessels
show no wear and look like they were interred in a
fresh, newly made condition, perhaps representing gifts
from loved ones. Whatever the case, the ancient Caddo
must have considered pottery important because they
included pottery vessels as grave offerings more
frequently than any other non-perishable material.
Clothing, mats, baskets, and objects made of wood may
have been more common, but these things usually decay
quickly. (The typically acidic soil in the Caddo
Homeland destroys virtually all organic materials,
including human bones, over time.)
Whole pots are also found in other
contexts besides graves, especially on the floors of
houses. For instance, over 30 vessels of various sizes
and forms were recently found on the floor of a house at
the Tom Jones site in the Little River Valley in
Arkansas. Most of these were broken by the collapse and
burning of the house. (Many pots included as grave
offerings are also broken.) For the archeologist, a
reconstructed pot is every bit as informative as a
never-broken vessel.
The ancient Caddo tradition of including
offerings of pottery in graves has led to the excavation
of thousands of Caddo graves, some by archeologists and
many more by looters ("pothunters") seeking pottery for
personal collections and, increasingly, to sell for
profit. No one really knows how many, but tens of
thousands of vessels have been removed from Caddo
graves. Many are traded or sold on the antiquities
market in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Some
spectacular Caddo vessels are rumored to have sold for
over $20,000. Even ordinary Caddo pots can bring
hundreds of dollars on the market.
The desecration of Caddo cemeteries has
long been a source of anguish to Caddo people (and Caddo
archeologists). As explained in the "Graves
of Caddo Ancestors" section , the Native American
Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990
has put the fate of most of the Caddo pottery vessels
excavated from graves by archeologists in the hands of
the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma. (NAGPRA applies to federal
agencies, federally funded or permitted excavations, on
federal and tribal land, as well as to all museums and
institutions that have received federal funding. While
this effectively covers most grave goods excavated by
professional archeologists, the law does not pertain to
graves dug up on private land or grave goods in private
hands.)
Caddo people are conflicted—they want to
honor their ancestors, but they are not sure that
reburying all grave goods and bones in mass or separate
graves hundreds of miles from their original resting
places, as some tribes have chosen to do, is the right
thing to do. Another possibility being considered by the
Caddo is to expand their own tribal museum so that
pottery vessels and other grave goods can be treated
properly and preserved for future generations as sources
of pride and knowledge about the past.
Regardless of what happens in the
future, Caddo pottery was important to the ancient
Caddo, it is important to the Caddo Nation today, and it
is important to anyone who wants to understand ancient
Caddo history.
Origin and Development of the Caddo Pottery
Tradition
When we say that the Caddo pottery
tradition began about A.D. 800, we do not mean to imply
that earlier ancestors of the people known today as the
Caddo weren't already making pottery. Clearly they were.
But we do not know exactly how, when, or even where, the
Caddo pottery tradition was first established. Partly
this is because it is often impossible to recognize the
origin or beginning of any complex phenomenon in the
ancient past. And partly it is because we have so few
well-excavated and well-dated Late Woodland and early
Caddo sites.
In part, the Caddo pottery tradition
grew out of the Fourche Maline pottery tradition that
developed during the Middle and Late Woodland periods.
Like early Caddo pottery, Fourche Maline pottery was
usually grog or bone tempered and it was sometimes
burnished. But Fourche Maline pottery was rarely
decorated and it is very thick-walled in comparison to
the Caddo fine wares. Vessel forms are also very
different between the two traditions. Some of the
favorite Caddo decorative techniques, incising and
punctating, are found on Fourche Maline pots, but most
of the designs are very simple.
The inspiration for these decorative
techniques almost certainly lies to the southeast in the
Woodland cultures of the lower Mississippi Valley (LMV).
Beginning with Tchefuncte pottery (800-200 B.C.) and
continuing on into the Middle Woodland period (200 B.C.
to A.D. 500) with Marksville pottery, incised, stamped,
and puncated designs were common. Trade pieces of
Tchefuncte and Marksville pottery are found in the Caddo
area. By Late Woodland times (ca. A.D. 500-800/900)
Fouche Maline potters began to copy the designs of Coles
Creek pottery from the LMV.
The origin of the technique of filling
the engraved patterns with pigments and the origin of
the distinctive early Caddo vessel forms—long-necked
bottles and carinated bowls—is not known. We do not see
clear precedents in the Woodland-period pottery of
either the Caddo Homeland or the Lower Mississippi
valley, or the central Mississippi valley, or the
Arkansas Basin. Therefore, we suspect that one of two
things happened: ancestral Caddo potters invented these
techniques for themselves or they borrowed the ideas
from distant cultures.
Archeologists have struggled with
explaining the origin of highly specific behaviors for
decades—are these "independent inventions" or the result
of the "diffusion" (spread) of ideas or of things like
domesticated plants? In the 1940s, Alex Krieger and
Clarence Webb, like many of their contemporaries,
favored the diffusion explanation. These Caddo scholars
and other prominent American archeologists of the day
pointed to seemingly close parallels between Caddo
pottery and the pottery of certain Mesoamerican cultures
in what is today Mexico and Guatemala. They could not
explain how the contact between these very different and
widely separated (in space and time) cultures took
place. Nor could they point to positive evidence of
direct contact, such as the finding of a pot made in
Mesoamerica at a Caddo site (or vice versa).
Caddo archeologists today reject the
notion of a Mesoamerican origin and see the Caddo
pottery tradition as an independent development
influenced only by neighboring peoples living mainly to
the east along the Mississippi River and along the Gulf
coast. The diverse Caddo pottery tradition bears witness
to the obvious inventiveness of Caddo potters and their
willingness to experiment. It is worth pointing out that
there are a great many cases across the world of the
obviously independent invention of specific forms of
pottery making and decoration. Carinated pottery,
long-necked earthenware bottles, and engraved designs
with pigment all occur in many places in the world that
are separated by thousands of miles or thousands of
years (or both). For instance, carinated pottery forms
similar to those of the Caddo tradition are also found
in Mesoamerica, South America, Africa, Europe, and Asia.
Thus it seems likely that about 1200
years ago, ancestral Caddo potters began to develop
their own distinctive pottery tradition by combining the
established ways of making pottery (the Fourche Maline
tradition and probably that of the Mill Creek and Mossy
Grove traditions) with inspirations from neighboring
peoples, and creative new ideas cooked up, so to speak,
in Caddo villages by Caddo potters. By A.D. 1000, the
Caddo pottery tradition was firmly established and
distinct from all others.
While some variation is apparent across
the region, Early Caddo pottery seems to vary much less
from place to place than would be the case a few hundred
years later. Compared to the Caddo potters in later
times (after A.D. 1400), early Caddo potters used fewer
decorative techniques, applied decoration to larger
areas of the surface of their fine wares, and left most
of their utilitarian wares undecorated. They also
favored bowl forms, especially carinated bowls, and
bottles, although they made jars, plates, effigy
vessels, and compound bowls, among other forms.
Decorative designs were typically curvilinear,
rectilinear, and horizontal. The relative homogeneity of
early Caddo pottery is thought to be the result of broad
and extensive social interaction among Caddo groups
After A.D. 1400, Caddo pottery became
more diverse in form and, especially, in decorative
technique and style. Caddo potters developed (or
borrowed) new decorative techniques including appliqué,
trailing (wide incisions, often curved), brushing, and a
great many combinations. Intricate scroll designs with
ticked lines, incised circles, negative ovals and
circles, triangles, and ladder designs are all common in
late Caddo pottery. Jar forms seem to have become more
important and bottles somewhat less so. New specialized
vessel forms such as rattle bowls and "tail-rider"
effigy bowls appear, the latter closely resembling
vessel forms in northeastern Arkansas. Very rare
examples of Caddo pots made in the style of
Mississippian head pots are also known.
More than anything, the Late Caddo
period was the time during which many local styles were
created. In part this probably represents higher
population levels (more people making pottery), but it
also seems to reflect the existence of more social
groups, each with its own local pottery tradition handed
down and elaborated on from generation to generation. It
is likely that the local styles were quite intentionally
made different from one another as an expression of the
identities of each Caddo community. Alice Cussens,
daughter of Mary Inkinish, told a WPA interviewer in
1937 or 1938: "each clan had its own shape to make its
pottery. You could tell who made the pottery by the
shape." [From David La Vere, 1998, Life Among the
Texas Indians, where her name is given as Mrs. Frank
Cussins. She was born in about 1885, by which time
neither Caddo pottery making nor Caddo clans survived
intact. Hence her words must reflect what she learned
from her mother.]
The invasion of European peoples and the
attendant catastrophic impacts on the Caddo (population
loss, forced moves, changing economy, etc.) brought
about a relatively quick end to the Caddo pottery
tradition. For a time in the late 17th and early 18th
centuries Caddo women were able to keep making beautiful
and distinctively Caddo pottery, but by the close of the
19th century, only vestiges of the tradition survived.
The last Caddo pottery of the original tradition was
apparently made in the late 1800s after the move to
Oklahoma.
Today, as can be seen in other sections
of this exhibit, there is hope that the Caddo pottery
tradition will be revived, at least as an art form. Of
course the tradition will never be the same without the
existence of the societies that kept it going. Modern
Caddo people use store-bought pots and pans, just like
everybody else in the developed world.
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Finely crafted Holly Fine Engraved bowl,
Early Caddo, ca. A.D. 900-1200. TARL
collections. Click to see top view.
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Looted Caddo cemetery in northeast Texas.
Photo courtesy Texas Historical Commission.
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Late Caddo bottle with poorly smoothed neck
bands and faint ladder-like design on main
body. Hume Engraved bottle, ca. 1400-1650.
TARL collections. Click on image for
enlarged view and detail of neck.
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A rare Late Caddo "head pot" from
southwestern Arkansas. The Caddo master
potter who made this extraordinary piece
obviously copied a typical Mississippian
head pot, but decorated it with Caddo style
engraving rather than painting. The engraved
designs may mimic facial tattooing. Courtesy
Picture of Records, original in the
Henderson State University Collection,
Arkadelphia, Arkansas.
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These peculiar little vessels are rattle
bowls. The protruding nodes are hollow and
contain small pebbles or rounded pieces of
clay that rattle when the bowl is
shaken. Late Caddo, ca. A.D. 1400-1650.
TARL collections. Click to see enlarged view
and close up of one bowl.
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Large tear-drop or gourd-shaped Sanders
Engraved "seed pot," so-called because of
the small restricted mouths. In fact, there
is no definitive evidence that such vessels
were used to store seeds. This one is much
too thin to have been a water jar and it
does have small holes near the rim that were
probably used to secure a lid, lending
support to the seed pot notion. Middle
Caddo, ca. A.D. 1200-1400. TARL collections.
Click to see enlarged view and detail of
rim.
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Typical Fourche Maline jar with thick walls
and a shape resembling a flower pot. This
Williams Plain pot is from the Crenshaw
site, Miller County, Arkansas. Photo by
Frank Schambach.
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Detail of artist's depiction of daily life
in an Early Caddo village. The woman on the
far left is engraving a bowl. Courtesy
artist George Nelson and the Institue of
Texan Cultures.
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