The Archaeology of the Caddo

12. Decisions in Landscape Setting Selection of thePrehistoric Caddo of Southeastern Oklahoma:A gis Analysis

335 12. Decisions in Landscape Setting Selection of the Prehistoric Caddo of Southeastern Oklahoma A GIS Analysis robert l. brooks Introduction Since the 1950s archaeologists have been interested in the question of how sites are spatially distributed. In a seminal study Gordon Willey (1953) examined patterns in the distribution of prehistoric settlements in the Viru Valley in Peru. Willey argued that the patterns in settlement and their changes through time reflected decisions on the part of the prehistoric societies in terms of where to settle as well as responses to changes in environmental, economic, political, and social conditions. Willey’s work also served as an avenue for examining a basic issue in archaeology: culture change. The practice of examining settlement distributions and changes in their patterns soon became widespread if not pervasive in archaeology (cf. Gumerman 1971; Smith 1978a). The study of “settlement patterns” became a fundamental part of basic archaeological analysis in the 1970s and 1980s. During this time, there were also ancillary types of analyses ranging from the examination of the circumscribed natural surroundings of a site-catchment (Findlow and Ericson 1980) to various statistical means of examining patterns in the spatial distribution of sites on the landscape (Hodder and Orton 1976). While settlement pattern analysis was widely embraced in the processual era of the 1970s and 1980s, it came under increasing criticism in the post-processual period that began in the 1990s. Settlement pattern studies were criticized for focusing too much attention on the natural/physical attributes in settlement placement choice with too little focus on a particular group’s decision-making processes in respect to locational 336 choice (Hirsch and O’Hanlon 1993). It was argued that many factors such as cultural preferences, political pressures, and religious considerations were not addressed through existing analytic procedures. There was also a concern that settlement pattern analysis was a static/passive perception of a group’s relationship to their natural and cultural surroundings . It was suggested instead that this relationship should be perceived as a dynamic or active one between the group and the natural and cultural world in which they lived. This more interactive dynamic view of a group’s behavior in a spatial sense became known as “landscape archaeology ” (cf. Bender 1993). While some landscape archaeology studies differed little from previous considerations of settlement patterns, others made a clear effort to distance themselves from this convention, examining issues such as the use of the landscape in a religious context (Tilley 1994). A Conceptual Model for the Examination of the Caddo Landscape This chapter focuses on an examination of the Caddo cultural landscape in one part of the Caddo area with the premise that landscape is a cultural construct. Within this context, Knapp and Ashmore (1999:10–13) describe constructed, conceptualized, and ideational landscapes. Constructed landscapes are a built environment representing an active intervention by a group in the form that the landscape takes. In other cases, the natural landscape may have associative religious, artistic, or social meaning. This is a conceptualized landscape. An ideational landscape is one that takes on the role of serving as a symbolic reference for mythical histories or other symbolic messages. The implication is that the landscape cannot be viewed as simply a physical feature upon which cultures construct a variety of built environments. Lewis et al. (1998) have proposed that the design of prehistoric Mississippian towns is ritually prescribed: that there is an architectural grammar for the construction of these places on the landscape that also represents sacred spaces. Obviously, an even stronger argument can also be made for the building of mounds and other ceremonial features on the landscape. However, if such an architectural grammar is present, is it consistently applied to different hierarchies within the built environment? The focus here is to examine Caddo residential and ceremonial constructions on the southeastern Oklahoma landscape and determine Brooks 337 whether there are distinctions in their placement that may reflect an active structuring of the landscape. Are places with mounds situated differently than residential places? Are there other landscape distinctions between larger ceremonial centers (places with multiple constructed mounds) and single mound locations? Such an analysis obviously must be accomplished through a study of attributes of the constructed landscape and their relationship to attributes of the natural environmental setting (i.e., soils, landform, elevation, distance to water). Through this examination it may be possible to gain some insights into...