Finely decorated ceramic vessels made for cooking, storage, and serving were a hallmark of Native Caddo cultures. The tradition began as many as 3,000 years ago among Woodland-period ancestors, thrived between c. 800 and 1800, and continues today in the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma. In Ancestral Caddo Ceramic Traditions, eighteen experts offer a comprehensive assessment of recent findings about the manufacture and use of Caddo pottery, touching on craft technology, artistic and stylistic variation, and links between ancestral production and modern artistic expression. Part I discusses the evolution of ceramic design and morphology in the Caddo Archaeological Area by geographic region: southwestern Arkansas, northwestern Louisiana, southeastern Oklahoma, and East Texas. It also gives focused study to the salt-making industry and its associated pottery. Part II features ceramic studies employing state-of-the-art techniques such as geochemical analysis, fine-grained analysis of stylistic elements, iconography, and network analysis. These essays yield increased understanding of specialized craft production and long-distance exchange; decorative variation at community and regional scales to reveal past communities of practice and identity; ancient Caddo cosmological and religious beliefs; and geographical variation in vessel forms. In Part III, two contemporary Caddos furnish an important Native perspective. Drawing on personal experience, they explore meaning and inspiration behind modern pottery productions as a cultural strategy for the persistence of community and identity. The first volume of its kind for Caddo archaeology, Ancestral Caddo Ceramic Traditions is also a valuable reference on ceramic practices across the broader southeastern archaeological region.

This landmark volume provides the most comprehensive overview to date of the prehistory and archaeology of the Caddo peoples. The Caddos lived in the Southeastern Woodlands for more than 900 years beginning around AD 800-900, before being forced to relocate to Oklahoma in 1859. They left behind a spectacular archaeological record, including the famous Spiro Mound site in Oklahoma as well as many other mound centers, plazas, farmsteads, villages, and cemeteries. The Archaeology of the Caddo examines new advances in studying the history of the Caddo peoples, including ceramic analysis, reconstructions of settlement and regional histories of different Caddo communities, Geographic Information Systems and geophysical landscape studies at several spatial scales, the cosmological significance of mound and structure placements, and better ways to understand mortuary practices. Findings from major sites and drainages such as the Crenshaw site, mounds in the Arkansas River basin, Spiro Mound, the Oak Hill Village site, the George C. Davis site, the Willow Chute Bayou Locality, the Hughes site, Big Cypress Creek basin, and the McClelland and Joe Clark sites are also summarized and interpreted. This volume reintroduces the Caddos' heritage, creativity, and political and religious complexity.

Multidisciplinary Old and New World research, using high quality paleoenvironmental and archaeological data, looks for correlations between climatic oscillations and socio-cultural adjustments in nomadic hunter-gatherer, horticultural, sedentary agricultural, and early urbanized societies. The outright collapse of cultural systems, sometimes associated with radical climate change, is not readily demonstrated and some contributions attribute culture change primarily to human agency. Others indicate that different cultures in diverse regions and times employ varying adjustment strategies, including economic and technological innovations (i.e., agriculture, wheels, monumental architecture, metallurgy etc.) and exhibit religious and social upheaval, warfare, genocide, or migration in coping with a changing world. Contents: 1) Dangerous Regions: A Source of Cascading Cultural Changes (Joel D. Gunn, William J. Folan, and Joseph M. Herbert); 2) Risky Business: Caddo Farmers Living at the Edge of the Eastern Woodlands (Timothy K. Perttula); 3) Environmental Change, Population Movements, and the Archaeological Record (Dean R. Snow); 4) Climate, Culture, and Change: From Hunters to Herders in Northeastern and Southwestern Africa (Ralf Vogelsang and Birgit Keding); 5) Fits and Starts: Why Did Domesticated Animals Trickle Before They Splashed Into Sub-Saharan Africa? (David K. Wright); 6) Socio-Cultural Responses to a Changing Environment: The Shashe-Limpopo Valley Since ca. AD 900 (Munyaradzi Manyanga); 7) Mesolithic Settlements of the Ukrainian Steppes: Migration as Sociocultural Response to a Changing World (Olena V. Smyntyna); 8) The Early Megaliths of SW Atlantic Europe and the Inference of the Socio-economic Organization of their Builders (8th to 6th millenniums BC) (David Calado et al.); 9) Pre-neolithization: Reconstructing the Environmental Background to Life Way Changes in the Late Mesolithic of the Carpathian Basin (Pal Sumegi); 10) The Mesolithic-Neolithic Transition in the Carpathian Basin: Was there an Ecological Trap During the Neolithic? (Pal Sumegi et al); 11) New Data Concerning the Detection and Nature of Human Impact on the Mohos Lakes, Northeast Hungary (Imola Juhasz); 12) Late Neolithic Man and Environment in the Carpathian Basin: A Preliminary Geoarcheological Report from Cs szhalom at Polgar (Pal Sumegi et al); 13) Freshwater Mussels and Life in the Late Neolithic Tell of Hodmez vasarhely-Gorzsa, southeastern Hungary (Sandor Gulyas and Pal Sumegi); 14) Imprints of the Anthropogenic Influences in a Peat Bog from Transdanubia, Hungary (Imola E. Juhasz); 15) Breaking Unnatural Barriers: Comparative Archaeology, Climate, and Culture Change in Central and Northern Europe (6100-2700 BC) (Maximilian O. Baldia); 16) Cultural Geography in the Context of Climatic and Environmental Change in the Late Neolithic and Eneolithic of the Morava Valley (Matthew T. Boulanger); 17) Taphonomic processes affecting monumental earthen architecture as a proxy for climatic change (Douglas S. Frink); 18) Neolithic Settlement in the Central-European Mountains (Pawel Valde-Nowak); 19) Separating Natural and Anthropogenic Influences on Past Ecosystems: The Testate Amoebae and Quantitative Paleoenvironmental Reconstruction (Edward A.D. Mitchell); 20) Environmental and Cultural Change in the Alps: Seeking Continuity in the Bronze Age Lake-Dwelling Tradition (Francesco Menotti); 21) Chapter 22: Society and Ecology During the Middle Bronze Age of Southern Scandinavia (Lars Larsson)."

"Documentation of Associated and Unassociated Caddo Funerary Objects "by Timothy K. Pertulla, et al., presents the documentation and study of Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) funerary objects from prehistoric sites in the collections at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas. The study arose from the 2006 concern that SFA was going to lose its anthropology program and its archeological repository. This concern brought Texas archeologists together to determine what might be done to keep the programs viable and to preserve Caddo articles in SFA's collection. The result, ultimately, was a continuing partnership between archeologists, the Caddo Nation, the university, and permanent faculty hired to maintain and study the Caddo collection. "Documentation" is the record of the completed NAGPRA inventories of funerary objects in the SFA collection, which were discovered at five known and recorded sites in northeastern and East Texas. The book documents and describes a number of ceramic vessels in the collection and characterizes vessel type and decoration as found at the burial sites. Among the book's features are maps of burial mound sites and illustrations of funerary objects found there. More than 100 colored photographs of funerary objects and artifacts illustrate the text; accompanying tables and appendixes detail these items.

Drawing on the latest archaeological fieldwork, Caddo Connections looks at the highly dynamic cultural landscape of the Caddo Area and its complex interconnections and exchanges with surrounding regions. The authors employ a multiscalar approach to examine cultural diversity through time and across space within the Caddo Area. They explore how and why this diversity developed, consider what allowed it to stabilize during the Mississippian period, and analyze changes following contact between historic Caddo peoples and Europeans. Looking beyond individual river valleys to the broader macroregion, they also address the linkages connecting the Caddo Area with the Southeast, southern Plains, and Southwest.

"A welcome addition to the sparse literature on this important Native American society." -- American Antiquity "Perttula's book is an essential reference for the specialist in Caddo culture and Caddo archaeology (the comprehensive bibliography alone is worth the price of the book). It offers much to a wider audience, however. Anyone who has ever studied the impacts of European/Native American contacts and the decline of native societies will welcome this as an excellent case study that succeeds in bridging the gap between historic documents and archaeological data.... It should eventually find its way into the classroom as a text, not only for the study of the Caddo, but for the study of European impacts on native people in general." -- Heritage

First published in 1992 and now updated with a new preface by the author and a foreword by Thomas R. Hester, "The Caddo Nation" investigates the early contacts between the Caddoan peoples of the present-day Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Arkansas region and Europeans, including the Spanish, French, and some Euro-Americans.

Perttula's study explores Caddoan cultural change from the perspectives of both archaeological data and historical, ethnographic, and archival records. The work focuses on changes from A.D. 1520 to ca. A.D. 1800 and challenges many long-standing assumptions about the nature of these changes.