Locked away and hidden from the nearby town of Longview, largely undisturbed for a thousand years, is an ancient and mysterious place that guards the secrets of a vanished people.
It is a sacred place. It is a wide, grassy clearing set in the middle of a forest.
But the truly remarkable discovery — what intrigues and inspires archaeologists — cannot be found inside the clearing, but just beyond it.
There, eight enormous, earthen structures rise from the forest floor, forming a giant ring around the open space. They are ceremonial mounds, remnants of a group of Caddo Indians who emerged as the earliest rulers of East Texas.
“It’s a super-important site,” said Tim Perttula, an Austin-based archaeologist.
The Egyptians had their pyramids. The Incas had Machu Picchu. The ancient peoples of East Texas had their mounds, and none in Texas are bigger or better preserved than the ones near Longview, according to files designating the site a nationally protected historic place.
The property is not open to the public. In exchange for access, the News-Journal agreed to report only that the site is on a bend of the Sabine River, just south of town.
Peeking in
Volunteer stewards keep a watchful eye over the site.
On a recent winter morning, Patti Haskins of Longview and Mark Walters of Kilgore scaled the mysterious mounds, treading carefully across ground strewn with leaves and pocked by rooting hogs.
“It would be really interesting to be in A.D. 1000 and peek through the bushes and see what was going on here,” Walters said. “It’s just hard for us to fathom what these people were doing. They thought they were the only people in the world.”
Indeed, it is incredible to linger among the round and rectangular mounds and ponder the people who built them. The tallest is just less than eight feet high, and the lengths and widths of them are many times that.
Taking great care, perhaps as part of religious or burial rituals, the Caddo selected specially colored dirt and hauled it by the basketload to form the massive heaps. Temples were then likely erected on the mounds.
“It’s amazing the amount of work you can get out of people in the name of religion,” Walters said. “There are maybe 100 graves under this mound. We just don’t know.”
If there are graves, he said, he and his colleagues have sworn to protect them. Others already have been lost.
Graves in peril
Ancient ceremonial sites and other important remnants of the Caddo people are in peril in East Texas, archaeologists say. Perttula has spent years documenting looting, grave-robbing and other damage to Caddo land.
Caddo Indians were buried with their possessions. Coveted by collectors, those possessions — including artifacts such as burial vessels and ancient pottery — can fetch thousands of dollars at collector shows and on the black market.
In the past two decades at Lake O’ the Pines alone, Perttula said, more than 250 graves have been exhumed illegally in two Caddo cemeteries on federal land. He said he has observed similar looting at other cemeteries throughout East Texas.
“At one, there were open grave pits for as far as the eye could see,” he wrote in a paper documenting the looting.
Perttula is the tribal archaeologist for the Caddo Nation in Western Oklahoma. He said tribe members find it difficult to slow the looting of land they were forced to leave in the early 1800s.
“It’s almost impossible to do anything about. It’s really hard to even find out when it’s happening, and usually when you find out about it, the looters finish and move on and there’s not much you can do,” he said.
“There are no laws except trespass laws to sites on private property. Of course, one of the things that drives the Caddo Indians insane is when they know one of their cemeteries is on private land and (someone is) digging it up.”
Fear of looting is why the location of the Longview mounds remains a secret, he said.
Surviving the odds
Unlike other Caddo sites around East Texas, the ring of ceremonial mounds on the Sabine River has led a charmed existence.
It narrowly avoided plunder in the 1930s, a time when archaeologists were driven to find museum-quality artifacts, rather than to learn about previous cultures. Surveying East Texas, a University of Texas archaeologist found one of the mounds, but he was unable to see the other seven through the thick vegetation.
Luckily, the archaeologist failed to grasp the importance of the site. Otherwise, it would have probably been destroyed, according to paperwork filed with the federal government’s National Register of Historic Places.
Thirty years later, the site survived another scare in the form of precocious teenager Buddy Calvin Jones. Jones was a Longview boy who was obsessed with the Caddo and their artifacts. His mother would drop him off at a site early in the morning. He’d dig all day, and at dusk she would retrieve him and his findings.
Jones got wind of the mounds. Hunting for artifacts in one of them, he dug a deep trench through it that is still visible. Jones quickly learned the mound was built of very fine, unstable silt.
“He almost got buried,” said Nelson Cowles, who was a friend of Jones. “His mom left him there that morning. He was digging 5 to 6 feet deep and getting in and out with a crude ladder.
“It caved in and buried him up to his waist. He had to dig himself out,” he said. “He said he didn’t think he’d ever go back there again.”
The National Register report says Jones returned with a friend, a front-end loader and plans to flatten the mound. A downpour came, and Jones abandoned the project.
Later, he became a professional archaeologist. He amassed an enormous collection of artifacts that he and his mother displayed in a private museum in Longview, and after he died in 1998 his mother donated the collection to the Gregg County Historical Museum. Haskins and other museum volunteers are cataloguing his findings.
Jones apparently never dug again at the ring of mounds on the river.
Unlocking the secrets
Archaeologists say the site, known as the Hudnall-Pirtle, is one of the most important Caddo centers in Texas. It could shed light on a time when American Indian culture was evolving to accommodate trade, a farming lifestyle and a tiered social structure with rulers and people being ruled.
From the mound center, priests or chiefs are thought to have reigned over the farmers in the surrounding countryside, demanding loyalty and tribute.
Archaeologists dug several test holes around the site. They found numerous artifacts outside the ring of mounds, but almost no artifacts within the ring. They concluded the area must have been an open plaza.
However, there are no plans to further excavate the site. Professional archaeologists earn their wages testing areas that are threatened by road construction, mining and other development. Despite a natural gas well pad that destroyed a corner of the Hudnall-Pirtle, there are no new threats to the federally protected site, and no money has been set aside for work there.
Perttula said he prefers to preserve, rather than excavate, such areas.
When he does excavate a site, he said, it is easy to become engrossed in the work. Every piece of pottery tells a story, and stains in the soil reveal the presence of wooden structures, tools and other materials that rotted away centuries ago but give clues to how the Caddo lived.
“I like a good mystery,” Perttula said. “I think of archaeologists as time detectives. You’re trying to make sense out of basically the chaos that went before, and there’s no one story, no one way to interpret it. You can’t prove it. You make your most compelling story.
“But people love a good mystery. They like to figure out stuff. I look at all these artifacts and stains in the ground, and now I have to make sense of it. That’s what keeps me in archaeology. That’s what’s fascinating.”
* * *
Important discovery near Longview
What: Eight ceremonial mounds that circle a giant plaza near the Sabine River south of Longview. There is evidence that temples were constructed on top of the mounds.
Recent history: While other sites around East Texas were being plundered for pottery and related artifacts, the Sabine River site went largely unnoticed until the 1980s.
Significance: Because it is relatively undisturbed, the site may explain how Caddo society became more complex, establishing rulers and regional trade.
Preservation: The nonprofit Archaeological Conservancy acquired the site, called the Hudnall-Pirtle, in 1986. In 1991, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places, giving it additional protection.
Learn more about the Caddo Indians
– The Depot Museum in Henderson displays artifacts that were removed from a village site to make way for a lignite mine in Rusk County. Address: 514 N. High St., Henderson; (903) 657-4303; www.depotmuseum.com
– The Caddoan Mounds State Historic Site west of Nacogdoches offers an interpretive center, an archeological experiment exhibit and walking trail. Address: 1649 Texas 21 W, Alto; (936) 858-3218
– Texas Beyond History, a virtual museum of Texas’ cultural heritage, includes a detailed section about the Caddo Indians. Online: www.texasbeyondhistory.net
* * *
Retired school teacher keeps alive love of Indian artifacts
HALLSVILLE — Anybody can wander a creek bed looking for arrowheads.
To be a serious artifact hunter, according to retired schoolteacher Nelson Cowles, one must do more than look around.
“First thing, you’ve got to get permission to get on the property. Years ago, I knew everybody,” said Cowles, 78, who began digging for artifacts in the 1960s.
“In the ’60s, you could find 50 or even 100 (artifacts) in a day,” he said.
When hunting, look for knolls beside creeks where spring branches run into a river, or check plowed fields after a rain, he said. Find washes and gullies or sand pits along the Sabine River. Then start digging.
“I can dig for a few hours, but I don’t have the energy to dig like I used to,” he said. “Golly, used to we’d be daylight to dusk out hunting.”
Cowles said he documents each of his artifacts to know where he found it. He said archaeologists who refer to collecting as “looting” need to lighten up.
“Of course, they don’t want anyone to pick up an arrowhead even,” he said. “There it is, but don’t pick it up.”
It’s true. Mark Walters, a volunteer archaeological steward for the Texas Historical Commission, said artifacts are better left untouched until an archaeologist can study the piece in its context.
“Leave it lay,” Walters said.
These days, Cowles said he spends less time digging and more time in his little shop, off Interstate 20 in Hallsville, crafting replica arrowheads and spear points.
Every Thursday, he and his cronies get together for an afternoon of flintknapping, squeezing into his workspace piled high with boxes of arrowheads, piles of pottery, trade beads and little ceramic pipes found around East Texas.
Cowles said the area remains rich in artifacts.
“Some we dug and some we didn’t,” he said.
“I know a lot of sites that haven’t been disturbed.”
1,720 responses to “Area mystery mounds delight archaeologists”
I would like information about a University of Texas archaeological dig in the 1930s about five miles north of Longview, Texas. This was about a quarter mile south of Hollybrook Drive (which was only a rural electric right of way at that time) and a quarter mile east of Tryon Road. This was most likely the John McFarland farm. My father bought this land from the McFarland family in 1945 and I grew up there. At the convergence of two creeks was a small burial mound, possibly 6 to 8 feet tall before it was excavated with a series of trenches running from east to west about 20 feet long. These were still visible when I was a boy in the 50s and early 60s. Information which I inherited from my father was that there was also a small village to the south of the creek on the high ground and that it and the mound were from the middle Caddoan period 700 c.e. There was also a very old road which ran by the village site east to west and down to the spring across the road from the Winterfield Methodist Church on Tryon. From there east it was obliterated. I believe this to be the remains of the southern Caddo Trace which showed as 8B on an 1840s map of Texas trails. It began on the eastern end of Caddo Lake and proceeded southwest across Upshur and Gregg counties and across Tarrant County. Somewhere west it joined with the Comanche Trail. It was later used as a farm road in the 1800s. There were the remains of a bridge across the creek under the trestle on the old Ore City Railroad bed a few hundred feet east of our home on Hollybrook Drive. Would to know more.
I would like information about a University of Texas archaeological dig in the 1930s about five miles north of Longview, Texas. This was about a quarter mile south of Hollybrook Drive (which was only a rural electric right of way at that time) and a quarter mile east of Tryon Road. This was most likely the John McFarland farm. My father bought this land from the McFarland family in 1945 and I grew up there. At the convergence of two creeks was a small burial mound, possibly 6 to 8 feet tall before it was excavated with a series of trenches running from east to west about 20 feet long. These were still visible when I was a boy in the 50s and early 60s. Information which I inherited from my father was that there was also a small village to the south of the creek on the high ground and that it and the mound were from the middle Caddoan period 700 c.e. There was also a very old road which ran by the village site east to west and down to the spring across the road from the Winterfield Methodist Church on Tryon. From there east it was obliterated. I believe this to be the remains of the southern Caddo Trace which showed as 8B on an 1840s map of Texas trails. It began on the eastern end of Caddo Lake and proceeded southwest across Upshur and Gregg counties and across Tarrant County. Somewhere west it joined with the Comanche Trail. It was later used as a farm road in the 1800s. There were the remains of a bridge across the creek under the trestle on the old Ore City Railroad bed a few hundred feet east of our home on Hollybrook Drive. Would like to know more.
Thanks Mark, Wes and Les for checking out my inquiry. Yes this is in Gregg County. Exact coordinates are 32deg.31’47″N, 94deg.43’8″W. I think this work was done by (UT) Alvin T. Jackson under the direction of James Edwin Pearce after 1935. Pearce died in 1938 and the new dept. head Gilbert McAlister put a new focus on West Texas sites redirecting Jackson’s expertise. I don’t think a definitive paper such as Pearce wrote on the East Texas work up to 1935 was ever done. I know the work was done. I saw the trenches. We buried our milk cow ‘Old Bossie’ in one of them when she died of milk fever in the creek adjacent to the south. This was about 1954. All of this may be wiped out now by a catch basin, drainage sway and mini warehouses to the south.
I would like to known of some flint quarries in or near longview tx because I love hunting arrowheads but haven’t been able to find much material!!! Help please
I live in south central van Zandt county, on top of one of the higher hilltops. A pond was dug a few hundred feet from the highest point, maybe 8 years ago. I started noticing large amounts of white petrified wood, and I think petrified bones. I looked around some more, just near the banks of the pond, where the erosion is at its worst and spotted many unusual rocks. We have plowed lately and are now pulling up big stumps. I think the rocks I’ve been picking up may be ancient Indian artifacts. Would anyone be able to come out here and look? The soil is extremely sandy with gray clay at some points below. Please help me figure out if these are artifacts, or just rocks!
I could tell you sometime possibly if you haven’t found out. Im in Mineola (903)780-3696
I’m sorry I hadn’t replied sooner. I have found even more items that are definitely artifacts, ie. Scrapers, flakes… but I have also found some very unusual ones too. Including a stone knife handle, a stone pendant with a 3d carving of a face, a dozens of game balls of various sizes, balsat cobbles, and large pieces of, I believe sandstone that are sand paper smooth on one side, and the other side all edges are at a 45 degree angle?? Please let me know if you would like some pictures. My email is shawna2606@gmail.com
just saw your post, I have found artifacts on my property also. I live north of you. I would like to look at what you have described to better understand what may be similar mounds on our and adjacent property.
Please email me if you would like to see some pictures. At shawna2606@gmail.com.
Carrie ,if you are physically capable and want to go see Indian sites around the Mt Vernon area I would be happy to show you a few. If you send me a friend request on Facebook I can show you a few pictures . John Tutor . I’m the John Tutor with the picture of a face carved in a root.
Hi Shawna, thanks for your comment. Intriguing! I passed it along to a couple of East Texas archeologists. Hopefully you’ll hear from one of them.
I live off the Saline Creek area, close to the Sabine River, in east van Zandt county, and I have a mound
around 8 to 10 feet high at the back of a hay meadow. I was wondering how to tell if it could possibly be
a caddo mound? The only weird thing is close to the middle of the mound running east to west is what
looks like a road running through it. It goes all the way through it too. The trees on this mound are probably
around 10 feet round, they are very large trees that’s been there a very long time. Theres a few small mounds close, but I know one was flattened to build on and it was clay. Any suggestions on a way you can
tell without excavating. And if excavating is necessary how do you start? Thanks
Can you enlighten me on the area around the Lone Star steel plant. Just seen the sign about removing any artifact from the area. just looking for the history. Thank you
I drove to Mt. Pleasant a whole lot last summer and always wondered about the large hills throughout that area – Mt. Pleasant, Mt. Vernon, Mt. Enterprise. They have an aura. They’re important. But they’re so much larger than the Caddo mounds I have heard about. I’d like to know more information about them if anyone knows, if they’ve been studied and what geological process built them if they were not made by Caddo people. I cannot imagine how those beautiful, symmetric hills that are just buzzing with life would appear in an area that is largely so flat.
I was surprised to hear about these mounds south of Longview. I live in Marshall, grew up here, and never heard about Caddo mounds in this area. Thank you for the blog post. We need to know history to preserve it.
Carrie ,if you are physically capable and want to go see Indian sites around the Mt Vernon area I would be happy to show you a few. If you send me a friend request on Facebook I can show you a few pictures . John Tutor . I’m the John Tutor with the picture of a face carved in a root.
My folks showed me several mounds on the Lil cypress as I was growing up.Amazing how huge this civilization was at that time.The mounds are essentially destroyed from local looters,consequently who have all died from measles.Ha
This is all so interesting to me! I just recently moved back to Longview and would love to explore if anyone wants to join me please email me at jenn98g@yahoo.com, thanks!
Please post photos of artifacts or send by email to me–Janet.kennedy0959@gmail.com
I have been doing a lot of “digging” on old reports and findings in the Longview/Hallsville area, and I have been trying to locate previously found, yet poorly documented site locations. I plan to compile as many site locations together as possible, both woodlands and caddo, over a modern map of East Texas, to possibly try to “recreate” any other potential travel routes that may have been used at the time. I grew up in Holly Lake Ranch, and was absolutely fascinated with the history there, and described in Pertulla’s “This Everlasting Sand Bed”. My focus has been mostly on/around the Sabine River area, surrounding US-80 and I-20 from Wood-Gregg Counties. There are thousands of acres of untouched marshes/floodplains surrounding the Sabine River, meaning there must be more sites within. I have spent countless hours on Google Maps trying to match locations to descriptions from previous reports, such as Grace Creek 1-2, Three Mounds, Boxed Springs, Hudnall-Pirtle, and Pine Tree Mound. Any information would be greatly appreciated.
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