How Texas Historians Write about the Pre-A.D. 1685 Caddo Peoples of Texas

Figure 1.

The southern Caddo area at its maximum extent c. AD 1000. Figure drawn by Sandra L. Hannum.

In ancestral times, beginning in the ninth century AD, long before Europeans came to what became Texas and the United States, the Caddo Indians established themselves as mound builders, expert traders and artisans, and eventually accomplished farmers as well as the most socially complex Native American communities living between the Mississippi River and the ancestral Puebloan peoples of the American Southwest. When Europeans came among them in the late seventeenth century, they relied on the good will and the diplomatic and economic skills of the Caddo to explore what became Texas. The Caddo’s rewards were disease, depredations, and territorial dispossession at the hands of French, Spanish, English, and American speculators, mercenaries, priests, traders, and land developers. By 1836, the Caddo’s fate in Texas had become clear, and the ensuing policies of the Republic of Texas and the United States between them led to their forced exodus from Texas to Indian Territory in 1859. The Caddo, now the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma, live to this day in western Oklahoma.

During the more than 2400 years that the Caddo peoples, and their Woodland period (c. 500 BC to AD 800–850) ancestors lived in Texas, they inhabited camp sites, hamlets, villages, and civic-ceremonial mound centers over a large area of four present states, including eastern Texas, northwestern Louisiana, southwestern Arkansas, and eastern Oklahoma.¹ More specifically, the southern Caddo area (Figure 1) was centered on the Red River and its main tributary streams as well as the Sabine and Neches Rivers in East Texas, and it included the Gulf Coastal Plain and Ouachita Mountains physiographic provinces. The northern Caddo area was centered in the Arkansas River basin in the states of Arkansas and Oklahoma, and includes parts of the adjoining Ozark Plateau. At its maximum extent, the Caddo archaeological area extends 600 kilometers north to south and 300 kilometers east to west, covering approximately 180,000 square kilometers.

The Caddo archaeological record is a one-thousand-year-record of cultural change and continuity among peoples who maintained their own distinctive sociopolitical and economic dynamic, distinct from the Mississippian peoples of the southeastern United States that historians have often confused them with. The Caddo archaeological and cultural tradition represents “an archaeological concept . . . recognizable primarily on the basis of a set of long-standing and distinctive cultural, social, and political elements that have temporal, spatial, and geographic connotations.”² Best known for the distinctive and beautifully made engraved ceramic vessels found on mound and habitation sites, the Caddo archaeological tradition in basic terms is characterized by dispersed but sedentary settlements of villages, hamlets, and farmsteads; the development through time of an horticultural-to-an-agricultural economy dependent upon domesticated corn, beans, and squash; and a complex sociopolitical structure denoted principally by a complex network of mound centers and the differential treatment of the dead by rank or hierarchy, most notably in burial mound shaft tombs accompanied by elaborate kinds of grave goods, many of exotic origin.³

Caddo archaeologists have argued that the development of Caddo cultural traditions in prehistoric times took place mostly independently of the emergence of Mississippian cultural developments in the southeastern United States. Archaeological research conducted over the past forty years in combination with the development of radiocarbon dating has shown that the Caddo archaeological tradition began by about AD 800–900, out of an indigenous Woodland-period tradition of hunter-gatherer-gardener peoples. Caddo societies shared much with their Mississippian neighbors, including the adoption of maize and the intensification of maize-based agricultural economies and their systems of social authority and ceremony.⁴ Although there are clear sociopolitical and trade relationships with the Southeast and various Mississippian groups, the people living in the Caddo area are manifestly different in several intriguing ways. Caddo archaeologists have also come to fully appreciate the impressive social and cultural complexity and diversity that characterizes the Caddo...