The McDonald Site: An Analysis of WPA Excavations at a Caddo Site in the Glover River Drainage, McCurtain County, Oklahoma

Between December 1941 and March 1942, the final federally-sponsored WPA excavations in Oklahoma were conducted at the McDonald site, located along the Glover River. Because federal funds for analysis dried up as the country entered into World War II, the recovered artifacts were never fully analyzed. Between 2008-2009, I analyzed the non-mortuary artifacts, which are curated at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History (SNOMNH) in Norman, and conducted an analysis of recovered stone and ceramic artifacts. Using previously unknown information from a recently unearthed final WPA Quarterly report, in this article I describe excavations and present the results of my analysis. I also incorporate Elsbeth Dowd’s previous analysis of the whole vessels recovered from burials into my study and compare the McDonald site material to the assemblages from two downstream mound sites, Clement and A.W. Davis