Radio Program | Caddo Mounds Fact Sheet | Printable version

Building for the seasons

Winter officially arrives today as the Sun reaches its southernmost point for the year -- a point called the winter solstice. In modern times, it's just a date on a calendar. But in earlier eras, the solstice was a time for both fear and celebration -- fear because it's the darkest, coldest time of the year; and celebration because it means the Sun soon will begin its journey northward.

Many ancient societies built "observatories" for watching the solstices and equinoxes -- rings of stones or posts, piles of dirt, or even special buildings. And they sometimes reflected their knowledge of the Sun's motion in the layout of villages or ceremonial centers.

One example may be at Caddo Mounds State Historic Site in East Texas. The site consists of three large mounds of dirt, plus the buried foundations of dozens of wood-and-grass houses. During a dig at the site, University of Texas anthropologist Sam Wilson explains that Caddo Mounds shows several possible astronomical alignments.



WILSON: Like most agricultural people, the Caddo were really interested in charting the seasons and paying attention to the movements of celestial bodies in the sky. You can tell from the way the platform mounds are oriented here that they were carefully aligned with stars or equinoxes. From other Mississippian sites, we know that keeping track of summer solstices, spring and fall equinoxes, and other calendric kinds of issues was really important.



More about Caddo Mounds tomorrow.



Script by Damond Benningfield, Copyright 2004

Production and distribution of this episode made possible in part by a grant from Humanities Texas, a state partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities

Air Date: December 21, 2004

From Texas to the North Star

WILSON: I'm Sam Wilson, a professor at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas, and we're standing at Caddo Mounds State Historical Site in Cherokee County, Texas. [:12]



At first glance, Caddo Mounds doesn't look like much. A two-lane highway runs past a tall mound of dirt, and two other mounds rise from a field of grasses and wildflowers. Yet Caddo Mounds is one of the most important archaeological sites in eastern Texas.

The site was inhabited from around the years 800 to 1300. It may have served as a small village, a center for special rituals, or both. Temples atop the mounds were periodically burned -- perhaps for astronomical reasons. And the site shows other possible connections to the sky, as Sam Wilson explains:



WILSON: Mound B, the large platform mound in the center of the site, was aligned due north-south. It may have been aligned with Polaris, with the north star. It shows that they were paying close attention to the alignment of buildings, such as Mound B. And we expect that other buildings, like the round houses with large interior posts, also seem to have a regular orientation with respect to the north-south axis. [:29]



Archaeologists continue to study the site in hopes of finding alignments to the solstices or equinoxes -- alignments that would establish Caddo Mounds as a calendar center for the Caddo people.



Script by Damond Benningfield, Copyright 2004

Production and distribution of this episode made possible in part by a grant from Humanities Texas, a state partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities

Air Date: December 22, 2004

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