Continuity and Change in Contact Period Caddo Communities in the Ouachita Mountains

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

For ancestral Caddos living in the Ouachita Mountains of west-central Arkansas, the two centuries between AD 1450 and 1650 saw both continuity and change. An extended period of drought in the 1450s and contact with outsiders beginning with the Spanish in 1541 would have stressed local farming communities. Responses may have included increasing interactions with neighboring communities within the region that preceded seventeenth-century relocations. Excavations at a village site in the upper Ouachita River valley gave an opportunity to examine persistence, responses, and changes. In particular, two large refuse pits excavated in domestic areas of the site -- one dating to 1500 and the other to 1650 -- provide a wealth of data about material culture, foodways, and chronology. These are key contexts for the definition of a new archaeological phase in the Ouachita Mountains and interpretations about the history of ancestral Caddo communities that lived there.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38282.0