History

• Archaeologists have traced the origins of Caddo pottery to 800 A.D., and have found evidence of early Caddo culture extending from Louisiana and Arkansas to Texas and Oklahoma. Mainly an agricultural people, their pottery was used in daily life for such things as cooking and storage, although they also made use of decorative pottery. The ancient Caddo even buried their loved ones with pottery that held offerings for the departed, such as food and water.
  
  

Features

• The Caddo made their pottery from clay. Almost always, they mixed the clay with crushed pottery fragments called grog. Sometimes they mixed the clay with bones or pulverized shells. They kneaded the clay mixture and then rolled it into coiled pieces. The coils were then set atop a base. After the creations dried, they were baked in an open wood fire. Sometimes they decorated a piece with a sharp stick before firing. Later it might have been polished with a smooth stone. Designs were crafted with very simple tools or even the potter's hands.
  
  

Expert Insight

• Each Caddo village had its own potters, predominantly women, and their styles often varied from one village to another. This accounts for the large variety of shapes and decorations. Older women passed on their skills to younger women, usually their daughters or nieces. Today the craft has nearly died out. One woman, Jereldine Redcorn of Oklahoma, has brought about the start of a resurgence of the Caddo pottery tradition. "There is hope that the Caddo pottery tradition will be revived, at least as an art form," according to the University of Texas at Austin, texasbeyondhistory.net. "Of course the tradition will never be the same without the existence of the societies that kept it going. Modern Caddo people use store-bought pots and pans, just like everybody else in the developed world."
  
  

Types

• Caddo pottery is known mainly for the jars, bowls and bottles that were produced. Some bowls were crafted in the shapes of animals, such as deer and dogs. Some potters made what are today called "tailriders," a type of bowl with an animal head sticking out horizontally from the rim, with a figure that resembles a person riding the opposite side of the rim. Rattle bowls contain pebbles inside nodules on the sides of the bowls, and they rattle when shaken.
  
  

Identification

• Caddo shapes are unusual. A bottle has been unearthed that was crafted in the shape of a whelk. Another looks like two spherical shapes pinched together in the middle, in a primitive hourglass shape. Some of the jars exhibit very fine engraving that resembles a geometric pattern, or even scrolled etching. The potters sometimes created a distinctly Caddo coloring on their pottery by using pigments like ochre for red, and other pigments for green, yellow and white. Others vessels were fired to a dark hue.