BELCHER FOCUS
The Belcher mound site, in Red River Valley about twenty miles north of Shreveport, gives its name to this Caddo culture period. Radiocarbon dates at the site and comparisons with other cultures suggest that the Belcher Focus began about A.D. 1400 and lasted into the 17th century. During its beginning. Belcher culture probably overlapped and coexisted with Bossier culture.
The Belcher site was excavated by Webb (1959) and his associates over a ten year period. The Belcher mound contained a succession of levels on which houses were built, burned or deserted, and covered over with new buildings. Burials were placed in pits beneath the house floors or through the ruins of burned houses. It is inferred that the houses were ceremonial lodges or chiefs’ houses. The earliest house was rectangular, with wall posts erected in trenches and packed with clay; a seven-foot entranceway projected northeastward. The walls were clay-daubed, and the gabled roof covered with grass thatch. Later houses were circular, also with projecting entranceways, and with interior roof supports and central hearths. They also were daubed and thatch-covered, but were divided into compartments, which contained internal posts for seats or couches and sometimes small hearths for eachcompartment. Food remains found on the floors of Belcher houses included maize, beans, hickory nuts, persimmon seeds, pecans, mussel and snail shells, and bones of deer, rabbit, squirrel, fox, mink, birds, fish (gar, catfish, buffalo, sheepshead, and bowfin), and turtle. Belcher tools encompassed stone celts (hatchets or chisels), arrow points which had tiny pointed stems, flint scrapers and gravers, sandstone hones, bone awls, needles and Chisels, shell hoes, spoons and saws, and pottery spindle weights.
Prehistoric Caddo pottery, conch shell ceremonial drinking cups, and lizard effigy shell necklace from Belcher Mound, Caddo Parish, Louisiana. Artifacts date approximately A.D. 1300 to 1400.
Prehistoric Caddo pottery, conch shell ceremonial drinking cups, and lizard effigy shell necklace from Belcher Mound, Caddo Parish, Louisiana. Artifacts date approximately A.D. 1300 to 1400.
Ornaments found with burials or on house floors at Belcher include beads, anklets, pendants and gorgets of shell, pearls, ear ornaments of shell, bone and pottery, bone hairpins, bear tooth pendants, shell inlays, and small shell bangles. Some of the shell pendants were carved in lizard or salamander effigy forms. Ceremonial drinking cups made of conch shells were sometimes decorated, one bearing a composite flying serpent-eagle design. Platform and elbow pipes were of baked clay. Split cane basketry or matting fragments show herringbone or 1-over-4-under weave.
Belcher pottery was superior to that of the Bossier people and, indeed, is some of the best in the entire Caddoan area. There was a diversity of bowl, bottle, urn, jar, vase, miniature, and compound forms. Large storage ollas were found broken on house floors. Techniques of decoration involved engraving, stamping, incising, trailing, ridging, punctating, brushing, applique nodes, insertion of red or white pigment into designs, red slipping, polishing, pedestal elevation, rattle bowls, bird and turtle effigies, and tripod and tetrapod legs. Many of the vessels had ornate or intricate curvilinear designs, with scrolls, circles, meanders, spirals, and guilloches; sun symbols, crosses, swastikas, and triskeles were added.
Many of the twenty-six burials found in Belcher mound exhibited a carry-over of the early Caddo burial ceremonialism, presumably including human sacrifice. Individuals or groups of up to seven persons were placed in shaft burial pits, and often were surrounded by many pottery vessels—sometimes in stacks—in addition to tools, arrows, ornaments, food offerings, vessels with spoons, decorated drinking cups, pipes, and other indicators of high rank. As many as twenty to forty pottery vessels had been placed in a single pit. Even small children had ornaments and numerous vessels, as though they were of the nobility. This suggests a hereditary social ranking as was found among the Natchez Indians.
Other mound centers of Belcher culture, occurring along Red River into southwestern Arkansas, show similar ceremonialism. Villages and hamlets along the river to Natchitoches and into the uplands are marked by typical Belcher pottery sherds. In all, late Belcher people were dispersed widely, and their way of life gave rise to the generalized cultural base that existed at the time of European intrusion.