Ancestral Caddo Ceramic Vessel Sherds from Sites in Gregg and Wood County in East Texas

There are many site artifact collections held in the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin (TARL) that are understudied and that have not been analyzed in detail according to current analysis standards. Among these collections are a number of site collections from sites in the Caddo area in East Texas (Figure 1), particularly ceramic sherd collections. In this article, I have tackled the intriguing collections identified from Gregg and Wood counties, Texas, mostly collected in the 1930s and early 1940s by Jack Hughes, then an East Texas resident (see Shaller 2020), but later a legendary Texas Panhandle archaeologist. In reviewing the Excel database that lists all TARL collections from sites in East Texas, provided to me by Marybeth Tomka, Curator of Collections at TARL, I have focused on the earliest collected set of sites, those sites with trinomials from 1-30 in each of the counties. While I have identified over many years a number of ancestral Caddo sites with ceramic collections in most of the East Texas counties, it was soon evident that most of these sites with 100-200+ sherds were in Gregg and Wood counties, and most were from collection areas along a few nearby creeks and streams in these counties. Thus, there was an opportunity to be gained in analyzing these collections to amass sizable sherd assemblages by particular locales, and such assemblage locales would likely be able to then provide regionally specific comparisons to currently better-known parts of the ancestral Caddo ceramic tradition in East Texas (see Perttula 2013, 2020a). In this study of Caddo ceramic assemblages in these twp counties, I have focused on a few sherd attributes: sherd type (rim, body, and base), decorative methods and elements by utility ware and fine ware, and temper inclusions. Select sherds have been drawn from a number of the sites to illustrate particular decorative elements present in the assemblages