The discovery of an ancient village at Fish Creek, formerly a channel of the Red River in Cooke County, Texas provides insight into the people of the Cross Timbers.
In the late 1980s, an archeological team led by Ernest Martin "read the room..." they used the geology and soil compositions of the Red River to uncover an ancient village site along Fish Creek, a short waterway that empties into the Red River, in northern Cooke County, Texas. Analysis revealed that the people who once lived here exhibited habits from both eastern and western cultures, proving once again that the Cross Timbers of the Red River Valley is truly the place "where the South meets the West."
Fish Creek is believed to have once been part of the Red River's main channel, but thousands of years changed its geology and left behind fertile soil, ideal for growing corn. The village, occupied around 1000 AD, was situated above the Fish Creek flood plain, with the corn planted nearer the stream to take advantage of the Spring floods that would water the crops. It was an ideal location for people who practiced agriculture as well as hunted deer and bison. They used stone and bone tools to work fields, fish, and process meat/hides, and they stored food inside shell-fired pottery. They also used the Red River as a conduit for trade, as items from the Mississippi River were found in the excavated village and its nearby cemetery, which included a house. This structure had been built with wooden posts, most likely a circular grass house. The archeologists recognized that the people buried their dead in close proximity to their homes.
But life was not easy for this village, as the scientists recognized when they uncovered a mass burial. The men and women inside this pit were buried in a jumble, with some of their bones missing. They appeared to have been decapitated. Their bodies may have been left to fester, as evident from marks on the bones left by rodents, and then deposited into the large hole after a while. A massacre/raid may have led to their demise, but examination of the bones did not lead to a definite conclusion.
When compared to other similar sites in the Red River Valley, the house, artifacts, and burials (the organized cemetery that also held artifacts like necklaces, and the mass grave) indicate common traits among the people, "characteristic of both the Southern Plains and eastern Caddo cultures" (p. 110).
Throughout recorded history, the assumption has generally been that in the early colonial era, the Red River valley in northern Texas and southern Oklahoma was barren of people. Any natives who lived along the Red River were either nomadic people from somewhere else or tribes from somewhere else who had been made into refugees due to white settlement pressures.
The archeology from the Cross Timbers region refutes this idea. The original people who lived in the Cross Timbers were agriculturalists who also practiced nomadic hunting, who fired pottery to store food, traded with tribes from the east and the west, harvested maize, buried their dead with artifacts, and lived in circular structures in decentralized settlements along creeks. Archeologists suggest that "the Red River was analogous to a natural highways that could be followed by pedestrians or navigated by dugout canoe" (Albert, 1984 as cited by Martin, 1991).
