Caddo Villages
The Caddo Indian Tribe belongs to the Caddoan linguistic family. The name Caddo is a derivative of Kadohadacho, which signifies "real chiefs" who formed a confederacy with six subdivisions. The Caddoans formed a confederacy in southern Oklahoma and northern Texas called the Hasinai Confederacy. The Caddo Indians established themselves as mound builders, expert traders and artisans, and eventually accomplished farmers as well as the most socially complex Native American communities living between the Mississippi River and the ancestral Puebloan peoples of the American Southwest. Although there are clear sociopolitical and trade relationships with the Southeast and various Mississippian groups, the people living in the Caddo area are manifestly different.
The Caddo trace their ancestral home to Southeastern United States. The earliest mention of the Anadarko Tribe of the Caddo Confederacy is in the relation of Biedma (1544) who wrote that Moscoso in 1545 led his men during their southward march through the territory which lay east of this group of Indians. Their villages were scattered along the Trinity and Brazos Rivers in Texas. References to the Caddo appear in the records of the De Soto expedition of 1541. Other earlier explorers found Caddo villages in present day west central Arkansas.
The Caddo were primarily agriculturists and traders until the horse as a means of transportation was demonstrated by early pioneers. After learning to ride horses, the Caddo adopted the transient culture of the Plains tribes, making hunting expeditions to the west. Four items the Caddos took with them each time they moved were a drum, corn, cedar, and fire. The fire (or ashes) from the last camp was used to start the fire of the next place of encampment.
Fourche Maline 1-7 (ca. 800 BC - 900 AD), a distinctive local culture, appeared on the Red River floodplain at the end of the Archaic Period prior to the introduction of ceramics. This culture spanned a 1500-year period from the Late Archaic through Caddoan periods. The Fourche Maline-Caddoan transition occurred rapidly over western Arkansas, northwest Louisiana, and eastern Oklahoma and Texas.
The Caddoan culture - Caddo I-V (ca. 900-1800 AD) - has often been seen as an outlier of the Mississippian tradition and suggested as ancestral to it. The central Caddo subarea encompassed southwest Arkansas, northwest Louisiana, and extreme southeast Oklahoma. The Great Bend region appears to be the Caddoan heartland with early important sites, such as Crenshaw, Bowman, and the ceremonial center of Battle Mound. Caddoan communities were dispersed throughout major and minor stream valleys of the Trans-Mississippian South. The largest communities and more important civic centers were primarily along the Red, Arkansas, Little and Ouachita rivers.
Caddoan communities were hierarchically arranged around a civic ceremonial center with platform and burial mounds, towns with political and religious compounds, associated but linearly dispersed farmsteads, small isolated hamlets, and specialized processing and/or procurement locales. Ties with towns were through exchanges of economic goods and participation in sociopolitical and ceremonial activities. Ceremonial centers also facilitated redistribution of goods, labor, and food resources when necessary. The dispersed towns consisted of small farmsteads, each with one or two houses, several open-sided bark or brush-covered shelters, and storage platforms with beehive-shaped thatched roofs. This arrangement represented an efficient strategy for exploiting critical resources in a linear meander belt zone.
The 1691-92 Teran map illustrated this pattern showing 25 clusters of buildings, of which 23 appear to be farmsteads dispersed along both sides of Red River and around two oxbow lakes. At the western end was a ceremonial center represented by a platform mound with a structure on its top and a brush shelter at the base.
While the Caddo are often referred to as if they were a single, unified group, they actually considered themselves a collection of many named extended family groups who shared a common culture of strict social rank. The scattered Caddo came together at mound centers like Caddoan Mounds during sacred and festive times. Caddo tribes maintained an adaptable political organization in order to meet the demands of a shifting local economy. For example, in the 1780s the Hasinai Caddo changed their social structure to eliminate the xinesi position as it was more advantageous for each village caddi to negotiate separately with the locally powerful Spanish and Comanches.
The complex Caddo society of social rank was held together by kinship, expectation and custom. Roles were defined by age, sex and clan.
- Xinesi — This head of the larger alliance of family groups was born into his job, lived at the mound center and served as an intermediary with God (Caddi Ayo). Xinesi lived on a mound made for important people.
- Caddi — Each village had a head man called a caddi who was also born into his job.
- Canahas — These village elders advised the caddi.
- Tammas — Tammas were enforcers who made sure people obeyed the caddi and behaved properly.
- Connas — As village priests, connas cured the sick and performed daily rituals.
- Common People — Farmers and craftspeople, commoners also provided the labor to build the sacred mounds.
As diplomats and negotiators, the Caddo attempted to work within the framework of white society to ensure their survival and prosperity. Agriculture did not become a dominant subsistence strategy among the Caddo peoples until after c.1200, not the early dates Texas historians have suggested. The Caddo farmed fields on the edges of woods, strung out for miles along streams and rivers. They ate very well off the land, hunting and gathering in the water as well as the woods and supplementing their diet with farmed crops. The abundance and variety of food, and the constant exercise required to obtain it, kept the Caddo healthy.
The Caddo homeland lay between the Great Plains tribes, the Eastern Woodlands tribes and the tribes of the Southeast. Taking advantage of this gateway position in the flow of trade goods, they managed a huge trade network with themselves at the center. Caddo villages hosted yearly trade fairs with tribes from near and far. The Caddo traded many different things, but some of the most important were information, diplomacy, favors and political influence. Caddo-made trade items such as pottery, reed baskets and bois d’arc bows have been found hundreds of miles away from their homeland.
Caddoan Mounds State Historic Site was a major regional trade center, Caddo groups lived here until about the year 1300. Visitors can see a burial mound and high and low temple mounds, and visit the museum.
Visiting Caddo country briefly in 1542, Europeans brought Old World crops like peaches and watermelon, which the Caddo quickly adopted. Around 1686, the Caddo started trading with Europeans to get guns and ammunition, horses, cooking and farming utensils, beads, blue cloth and lace. The Caddo dealt strategically with Europeans throughout the 1700s, carefully cultivating alliances with them to maintain access to their goods and military protection. The diplomatic Caddo negotiated with different tribal and European groups at different times, depending upon their current agenda and needs.
The Europeans also brought smallpox, measles and cholera to which the Caddo had no resistance. Three generations later, these diseases had killed as many as 95% of the Caddo. Waves of disease swept through Caddo villages periodically, until there were fewer than 1,000 Caddo left.
Large portions of the Caddoan area along major streams, such as the Arkansas, Red, and Ouachita rivers, were apparently abandoned by the time of European contact ca. 1680 A.D. The abandonment involved movement of groups as well as coalescence with other Caddoan groups that lived mainly in major riverine settlements along Red River. In east Texas, the impacts of depopulation and abandonment were less among the rural Western Caddoan communities. These communities were even more scattered than previously. Many small river valleys were unoccupied or had smaller overall population.
In 1859, the remaining Caddo were forced onto a tiny reservation near Anadarko, Oklahoma. In the late 1800s, the remnants of the many named Caddo tribes united to save their shared culture, consolidating into one group for the first time. In 1936, Caddo leaders wrote a tribal charter and elected a formal government.
Perhaps the largest East Texas Caddo site is the George C. Davis mound center on the Neches River in Cherokee County, now known as Caddo Mounds State Historic Site. More than 1,200 years ago, a group of Caddo Indians known as the Hasinai built a village 26 miles west of present-day Nacogdoches. The site was the southwestern-most ceremonial center for the great Mound Builder culture. It is estimated to cover about 120 acres. The Caddo selected this site for a permanent settlement about A.D. 800. The alluvial prairie possessed ideal qualities for the establishment of a village and ceremonial center: good sandy loam soil for agriculture, abundant natural food resources in the surrounding forest and a permanent water source of springs that flowed into the nearby Neches River. From here, the Caddo dominated life in the region for approximately 500 years. The settlement at Caddo Mounds flourished until the 13th century, when the site was abandoned. Most archeologists agree that the elite ruling class left Caddo Mounds after the loss of their regional influence, as outlying hamlets and trade groups became self-sufficient and grew less dependent on the cultural center in religious and political matters. There is no evidence that war played a major role at Caddo Mounds.
Timothy K. Perttula "Many Texas historians also offer characterizations of Caddo settlements in pre-A.D. 1685 contexts that are not supported by research of the Caddo archaeological record. I am not sure where the notion came from, because there is absolutely no archaeological evidence to support it, but a number of Texas historians seem to think that the Caddo lived in urban settlements as well as villages, hamlets, etc.: “clearly outlined urban sites,” “towns,” “a few larger towns,” or “very large cities.” Some also suggest that these towns and cities were established on the Trinity River, as well as the Angelina, Neches, and Red Rivers, though I have no idea where such large settlements were located; none have ever been found by archaeologists. One historian goes so far as to write that the Caddo lived in “huge cities,” as well as towns and villages, but there were never any cities in East Texas “holding thousands of people,” although there were many dispersed villages, hamlets, and farmsteads. There simply is no basis for these kinds of descriptions..."
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