Indian Cemetery and Villages
Quitman, Wood County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Found during road-building operations and reported Nov. 1966. In Jan. 1967, eight graves were studied, but the bone fragments unearthed were so old that they crumbled upon exposure to air. Pieces of pottery were also found in the cemetery and in six villages in the vicinity. Grindstones, a jar with red paint, water jugs, and skinning stones suggest that the area may have been inhabited about 1200 to 1500 A.D., and possibly at an earlier time, by the Caddo Indians, an agricultural people with a highly advanced culture. Other cemeteries exist nearby. (1968)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Road building in 1966 uncovered graves and pottery here, and study the next year found bone fragments so ancient they crumbled in the open air. Grindstones, painted jars, water jugs, and skinning stones scattered across the cemetery and six nearby village sites point to occupation between roughly 1200 and 1500 A.D., and perhaps earlier. Archaeologists attribute them to the Caddo, an agricultural people known for a sophisticated culture.
Why it matters
It marks the deep Indigenous past of East Texas, remembering a thriving Caddo world that flourished for centuries before European contact.
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Related events
- · 1966–67 excavation
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Caddo Indian Communities in Wood County
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Beginning in the ninth century, the Caddo — allied peoples with distinct dialects and customs — built complex societies along the rivers of present-day Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas, sustained by wide trade networks, advanced agriculture, and elaborate ritual. When Europeans arrived in the 1540s they recorded a name meaning 'Real Chief,' and locally it was the Hasinai who lived along the Sabine. Pressured by American settlement, the Caddo left their ancestral homeland by the 1840s, and archaeological sites in the Mineola Nature Preserve still preserve the pottery, tools, and mounds of a thousand years of habitation.
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