The Caddoan Oak Hill Village Site

Rarely do prehistoric archeologists in North America have the opportunity to completely excavate and study an entire Native American community or village. To be able to expose a Native American village in its entirety provides a unique, and unprecedented, view of the past community and social arrangements that existed among Native American societies before contact with Europeans.Recently, in northeast Texas, the Oak Hill Village site (41RK214), a large village occupied by prehistoric horticultural-agricultural Caddo peoples between about A.O. 1050 and 1450, was fully uncovered under the direction of J. Brett Cruse (then of Espey, Huston & Associates, Inc., Austin, Texas) for Texas Utilities Services. The company plans to strip mine the site area in the near future for lignite coal. With the cooperation of TU Services, the investigations at the Oak Hill Village were the most extensive ever completed at a Caddo Indian site.