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.”

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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

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