Who were the ancient Caddo?

The poems and plays of Shakespeare may contain the whole world, but that’s not enough. We want to know about the man himself. We want biography.

It is human to want to know something about the lives of artists. That knowledge can help us understand their art. So I was thrilled to recently read a headline in this paper: “Study says ancient skulls at Miller County site belong to Caddo ancestors: Miller County site likely tribal grave.”

Nothing in the history of visual art can rival an un-incised Caddo seed jar. In simplicity, proportion, and combination of delicacy and strength, the vessels excel anything made by human hands.

They are the highest expression of a material culture that emerged by 900 CE; its artifacts have been discovered at burial sites (and elsewhere) occupied by ancestors of the modern Caddo people. By the 1540s, some 25 tribes sharing a greater Caddoan culture had settlements along the Brazos, Trinity, Neches, Sabine, Red, and Ouachita Rivers.

Within the boundaries of modern Arkansas, archaeologists have studied settlements and burial sites along the Red River and the Ouachita. As an amateur, I observe that the golden age of Caddo pottery seems to have been from about 1200 CE to 1500 CE. Credentialed archaeologists conducted a study, soon to be published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, of teeth from skulls and mandibles found buried in several clusters at the Crenshaw site near the Red River in Miller County.

The teeth belonged to 352 different people who lived between 1253 CE and 1399 CE. They would have been contemporaries of the great Caddo potters; some might have been potters themselves. In terms of the relationship between cultural context and art, anything that archaeologists can discover from the skull and mandible horde is equivalent to the discovery of a previously unknown cache of cemetery data relating to Shakespeare’s neighbors along the River Avon and the River Thames.

When skulls and mandibles are found disarticulated (severed) from the rest of a body, people tend to assume, quite reasonably, that they are trophies of war, especially if found in a cluster. The first modern archaeological investigation of the Crenshaw site was in 1912, and systematic investigations by professional archaeologists began in 1962. Those later investigations uncovered the human skull and mandible clusters, as well as an “Antler Temple” containing the antlers of 1,021 adult male white-tailed deer.

Since those discoveries, students of the site have debated whether the skulls and mandibles represent war trophies or a practice of ancestor veneration, in which ancient Caddos severed heads or jawbones of their recently dead or previously buried in order to bring them from dispersed settlements to the cultural center at Crenshaw for burial or reburial.

Assuming cultural cohesion— that the Caddo were not making war among themselves— and assuming cultural homogeneity—that most of the people living within what we call the Caddo cultural area were indeed Caddo—the discovery that most of the skulls and mandibles found at the Crenshaw site came from Caddo areas would suggest that the skulls and mandibles were not trophies of war.

When we shed baby teeth and adult teeth begin to come in, we incorporate elements from our environment into our tooth enamel by ingesting food or dirt, or by inhaling dust. The chemical elements we know from the Periodic Table each represent a type of atom defined by the number of protons in its nucleus. Each element can have multiple isotopes, however, because the number of neutrons in an atom’s nucleus can vary.

The ratio of isotopes of any given element in rocks and soil varies from place to place, so when we incorporate local elements into our tooth enamel by ingestion or inhalation, we pick up a local signature that indicates where we grew up. This holds true for the teeth of non-migratory animals as well.

John R. Samuelsen and Adriana Potra, authors of the new Crenshaw study, analyzed the ratios of lead isotopes in the tooth enamel of the 352 people whose skulls and mandibles were found at the Crenshaw site, and compared them to the lead isotope ratios in the enamel of teeth from 180 non-migratory animals found at 28 ancient sites in southwest Arkansas, Illinois, and Oklahoma.

They found that lead isotope ratios in the human tooth enamel from Crenshaw matched the ratios in animal tooth enamel from sites elsewhere in southwest Arkansas, not in Oklahoma or Illinois. So, they conclude, the skulls and mandibles from Crenshaw are not trophies of war.

Archaeologists tend to have a well-developed sense of human complexity, as well as humility and understanding of the rules and limits of their field; they don’t run around yelling “The science is settled!” There will always be room for debate. But for now, let’s accept Samuelsen’s and Potra’s conclusion about the people responsible for the burials at Crenshaw. What can we draw from it?

“They were a peaceful people” is a too broad for my taste, but I like to think that the people who produced my favorite art belonged to a culture that was settled, not given to raids or collecting enemies’ heads, and that the backward-looking nature of ancestor veneration indicates a well-developed sense of continuity and time.

A thoughtful amateur collector named Jim Maus notes that the idea that Caddo seed jars were made to hold seed comes from comparing them to seed jars in the Southwest. In our humid climate, pouring seed into these round and oblong beauties for storage would probably cause the seed to mold or sprout. The Caddo jars may be art for art’s sake, or for religion’s sake, or for burial’s sake. Or for all three, given that they are so intertwined.

The way the jars were fired, notes Maus, produced “mottled gray/black/tan fire cloud colorations.” Some jars are short and wide, he writes, “but most are tall and stout with the ratio of height to width being around two to one.”

By not decorating over the fire cloud colorations, the artists left something to chance in the midst of their careful intentions. The plain, tall, stout jars Maus describes are the most beautiful. And there is something comforting in that two-to-one ratio of height to width. There is a mystery to its appeal.

Naturally, a clue to one of life’s great mysteries would emerge from Clark County. In 1972, workers were loading gravel into a truck near the place where the Caddo River meets the Ouachita. By accident, they uncovered a Caddo grave that contained a human effigy. The abdomen is a vessel adorned by shoulders, arms, and clutching hands; on top a thick neck, a head turned upward, large features conveying agony or hope or both. Beneath: a pronounced navel, iliac crests. Further details make it clear this is a woman, and most likely she is giving birth.

And the abdomen, the vessel joining all of the other features together? Taken alone, it is a perfect Caddo seed jar.