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The de Soto chronicles (Clayton et al. 1993; Hudson 1997) introduce us to the Caddo Indian peoples of the Trans-Mississippi South (Figure 4.1). It was a hard introduction all around (cf. P. E. Hoffman 1993). The Gentleman of Elvas had this to say when the Spaniards reached the Caddo province of Naguatex on the Red River in August of 1542: The cacique [of Naguatex], on beholding the damage that his land was receiving [from the Spanish forces], sent six of his principal men and three Indians with them as guides who knew the language of the region ahead where the governor [Luis de Moscoso] was about to go. He immediately left Naguatex and after marching three days reached a town of four or ¤ve houses, belonging to the cacique of that miserable province, called Nisohone. It was a poorly populated region and had little maize. Two days later, the guides who were guiding the governor, if they had to go toward the west, guided then toward the east, and sometimes they went through dense forests, wandering off the road. The governor ordered them hanged from a tree, and an Indian woman, who had been captured at Nisohone, guided them, and he went back to look for the road. (Robertson 1993:145; brackets added) Despite the “miserable” condition of the lands traversed by the Spaniards in Caddo country, the Caddo were successful agriculturists, with a Mississippian societal ®avor (cf. J. F. Scarry 1996a:13), as well as bison hunters when they were¤rst described in 1542 by the Spanish expedition. These chronicles provide an initial and rare glimpse of the geographic boundaries, distribution, and social organization of a number of major Native American polities in the Southeast U.S. (Ewen 1997:132–133; C. Hudson et al. 1984). Of particular importance is that the chronicles afford hints about several different aboriginal Caddoan populations, their sociopolitical character, and the social and cultural landscape that existed at that time, as well as of their relationships with other Mississippian chiefdoms, when they 4 / Caddoan Area Protohistory and Archaeology Timothy K. Perttula were “still in the full state of their indigenous developments” (Brain 1985a:xlviii; see also Ewen 1997:132–133; C. Hudson et al. 1984). The archaeological record of the Caddo peoples from ca. a.d. 800 indicates that they lived in the Arkansas, Oklahoma, T exas, and Louisiana area, centering on the Red River Valley, but extending from the Arkansas and Red River valleys into the western Ozarks as well as south into deep East T exas and east into central Arkansas (Figure 4.2), in what has been called the Trans-Mississippi South (Schambach 1970; see also Perttula 1997:7). Despite archaeological investigations beginning in the latter years of the nineteenth century, and many major research efforts since Figure 4.1 Redrawn version of the “De Soto Map,” ca. 1550. 50 / Timothy K. Perttula that time (see compilation in Perttula et al. 1999), current knowledge about the cultural heritage of the Caddo Indian peoples is not widely shared, understood, or appreciated by more than a handful of archaeologists, ethnohistorians, and historians (e.g., Perttula 1996b). During prehistoric and historic times, however, the Caddo peoples were a powerful group of related theocratic chiefdoms who exercised, through their political and religious elite, great political skill and trading savvy with their southeastern Figure 4.2 The distribution of Caddoan archaeological phases at initial contact. Reprinted from Bulletin of T exas Archaeological Society, by Timothy K. Pertulla. © T exas Archaeological Society, 2001. Used by permission. Caddoan Area Protohistory and Archaeology / 51 U.S. Mississippian neighbors (see J. A. Brown 1996; Early 1993; Rogers 1996; Sabo 1995a). Current conceptions of the character of Mississippian societies suggest that the Caddo people shared broad af¤liations with them, given that they were maize agriculturists with a hierarchical political organization, and they shared “a set of religious cult institutions and iconographic complexes” (J. F. Scarry 1996a:13). Nevertheless, when boundaries of Mississippian societies are drawn, most of the Caddoan area—other than the Arkansas and Red River basin Caddoan groups (cf. J. F. Scarry 1996b:Figure 1.1)—is excluded from the Mississippian world. Along with other native populations of the Southeast (Axtell 1997:43–44, 69), the Caddo have withstood—in the face of disease, colonization, and acculturation —the centuries-long and continuing interaction with Europeans (see Avery 1996; Carter 1995a; Perttula 1994, 1996a; Rollings 1995; F. T. Smith 1995). They survived and apparently thrived at critical...

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