Fourche Maline culture

The Fourche Maline culture is an archaeological culture of the Woodland period in the south-central United States, found in south-eastern Oklahoma, south-western Arkansas, north-western Louisiana and north-eastern Texas. It flourished from roughly 300 BCE to 700–800 CE. Its people are regarded as among the main ancestors of the later Caddo, whose descendants today form the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma.

The culture takes its name from Fourche Maline Creek, which feeds the Poteau River in eastern Oklahoma. In the late 1930s and 1940s, crews of the federal Works Progress Administration dug several sites in south-eastern Oklahoma's Wister Valley. Many of the sites were thick, dark, gradually built-up deposits of refuse that the excavators called "black mounds". Archaeologists first described these remains as the Fourche Maline Focus. In 1980 the pottery-bearing layers were renamed the Fourche Maline Phase, and the older layers without pottery were assigned to a separate Wister Phase. Around the same time, "Fourche Maline culture" came into use for similar sites across the region, especially in south-western Arkansas.

Radiocarbon dates from the Oklahoma sites point to a start around 1 CE, although there is evidence that the culture may go back to about 300 BCE. Its end is usually placed around 700 to 800 CE, which sets it firmly in the Woodland period. Many of its tools continue forms found in the earlier Wister Phase, so the line between the two is one of gradual change rather than a sharp break.

Pottery, probably introduced from the Tchefuncte culture of Louisiana, is the culture's hallmark. Vessels were thick-walled and flat-bottomed, rather like flowerpots, and tempered with crushed pottery, bone, grit or sand; Williams Plain is the most common type. People also used stemmed dart points of the Gary type, double-bitted stone axes, bone awls, hairpins and fishhooks, shell beads, and grinding stones. Small corner-notched arrowheads appear around 600 CE, marking the arrival of the bow and arrow.

Sources differ on how far the Fourche Maline people farmed. One account describes them as becoming more settled and growing crops of the Eastern Agricultural Complex, eventually including maize; the Oklahoma evidence summarised by Rain Vehik points instead to hunting and gathering, with deer, turkey, fish, shellfish, hickory nuts, acorns and persimmons. No clear house plans have been found, and groups may have dispersed seasonally to camps in valleys and uplands. Exotic goods such as marine shell, pearls and copper reached the area through trade with the Marksville culture and other peoples linked to the Hopewell tradition, and some burial mounds and early platform mounds point to growing social ranking.

Burials, usually single flexed bodies within the midden mounds, reveal hard lives. Archaeologists estimate average life expectancy at about twenty-six years, and arthritis and dietary shortages were common. Projectile points lodged in bone show that violence was a frequent cause of death. At the McCutcheon-McLaughlin site in Latimer County, excavated in the mid-1970s, a mass grave held nine people, mostly women and children, killed with points made of chert from south-west Missouri and northern Arkansas, perhaps by a raiding party from that region.

Whether these groups lived year-round at the sites is unclear, but their traditions shaped later developments in the Arkansas and Red River valleys. Archaeologists see them as a key ancestral strand of the Caddoan Mississippian culture and of the Caddo people.

Our maps for 100 BCE, 1 BCE, 100, 200, 300, 400 and 500 draw the culture's area as "Fourche Maline Culture"; the outline is approximate, and the maps do not mark its beginning or end.