Distinctive potsherds such as these fragments of Late Caddo pottery from the A.C. Saunders site allow archeologists to estimate the date of Caddo settlements. TARL archives. Click to see full image.
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Map showing Native America as perceived by the French in the early 18th century. This was one of the first reasonably accurate depictions of the Mississippi and its tributaries including the Red (Rogue) River. The locations of Cadohadacho (Cadodaquios), Hasinai (Les Cenis), and Natchitoches are shown. From Carte de la Louisiana et du Cours du Mississipi, by Guillaume Delisle, 1718.
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Over 150 generations of Caddo people have lived and died since the time more than 3,000 years ago (perhaps much more) when the ancestors of the Caddo split from the ancestors of the Northern Caddoan groups (see Caddoan Languages and Peoples section). Over this long span of human history, Caddo societies have changed in all kinds of ways, some of them fundamental. Today we have only an inkling of most of these changes. Archeologists find evidence of only certain kinds of specific events, such as the debris lfet behind from a multi-year settlement, the burning of a house or the burial of an individual, that leave obvious traces. Most ordinary events and even those that must have been extraordinary like victory celebrations, visits by the leaders of distant groups, and the destruction of a village by a tornado, leave few traces that an archeologist can recognize. Similarly, most individuals are invisible in the archeological record. The only individuals who stand apart in prehistory are those whose burials we find. Archeologists can recognize patterns and detect trends through time, but without written or remembered history to guide us, our view of prehistory is very broad—sort of like flipping through a history book and seeing only the chapter titles and a few pictures. To cope with uncertainty and information gaps, archeologists construct chronologies (timelines) such as the one presented below. While such a linear concept of time is useful to scientists and historians, it would have been foreign to the ancient Caddo. In most traditional Native American societies, time was perceived as cyclical and reoccurring. It was measured and marked by moons, seasons, generations, and transforming events such as massive floods, celebrated victories, the founding of a new village, or the death of a charismatic leader. However, knowledge of most of the transforming events in Caddo history has been lost, leaving us with a mix of faint surviving memories, dance and song tradition, a precious few detailed early written accounts, and an ever-growing mass of archeological data from hundreds of archeological sites linked to the Caddo. This latter may sound impressive, but most such archeological sites are places where fragments of Caddo-style pottery have been found on the surface and little investigation has been carried out. Even with the relatively few sites that have seen extensive archeological research, it is often difficult to determine precisely when the sites were occupied without considerable research effort. Dating is almost always an exercise in approximation in archeology. Even the radiocarbon dating technique yields only statistical estimates with decades-long standard error ranges, rather than precise dates. Our knowledge of the later history of the Caddo, after Europeans arrived and began recording information, is much fuller, but still very incomplete. Europeans only wrote about what they happened to see or learn that interested or concerned them. And they always saw the Caddo through the eyes of strangers in a strange land. As we move toward the present, our view of history becomes sharper and sharper as we listen to Caddo voices and compare what they say to what various officials, travelers, and neighbors wrote. Maps, paintings, photographs, and voice recordings all add critical knowledge. With these caveats in mind, we present a culture history timeline that summarizes some of the major changes through time. In this chart you will notice that the earlier periods are longer and are often rounded off into centuries or even thousands of years. This reflects the lack of precision of our dating methods. Note also that some of the periods shown below overlap with one another. This is because time periods are abstract approximations that cut up time into neat little blocks out of convenience; in reality things do not always occur in an orderly linear succession or occur simultaneously from place to place. Even today in the Digital era, there are still millions of people across the world that do not have electricity or running water, technological advances that most of us take for granted. This example reminds us that technological and cultural changes typically take decades or centuries to spread, even today. |
The remains of this burned structure represent a specific event, the ritual destruction of a small temple followed by the intentional burial of the remains with a new layer of earth. Two successive temples, both burned and buried, were found within and beneath a small Late Caddo mound at the Harroun site in Upshur County, Texas. TARL archives.
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As we move toward the present, our view of history becomes sharper and sharper as we listen to Caddo voices and compare what they say to what various officials, travelers, and neighbors wrote. |
The 1873 census records a total of 401 Caddos, including 116 men, 139 women, 86 boys, and 60 girls as well as 2214 horses, 1032 cows, and 1293 hogs. Courtesy Cecile Carter.
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