The Caddo Chiefdoms: Caddo Economics and Politics, 700-1835

by David La Vere

For centuries, the Caddos occupied the southern prairies and woodlands across portions of Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. Organized into powerful chiefdoms during the Mississippian period, Caddo society was highly ceremonial, revolving around priest-chiefs, trade in exotic items, and the periodic construction of mounds. Their distinctive heritage helped the Caddos to adapt after the European invasion and to remain the dominant political and economic power in the region. New ideas, peoples, and commodities were incorporated into their cultural framework. The Caddos persisted and for a time even thrived, despite continual raids by the Osages and Choctaws, decimation by diseases, and escalating pressures from the French and Spanish. The Caddo Chiefdoms offers the most complete accounting available of early Caddo culture and history. Weaving together French and Spanish archival sources, Caddo oral history, and archaeological evidence, David La Vere presents a fascinating look at the political, social, economic, and religious forces that molded Caddo culture over time. Special attention is given to the relationship between kinship and trade and to the political impulses driving the successive rise and decline of Caddo chiefdoms. Distinguished by thorough scholarship and an interpretive vision that is both theoretically astute and culturally sensitive, this study enhances our understanding of a remarkable southeastern Native people.

199 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1998

Reviews

[Roy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book, despite its title really covers only the Eighteenth and first few years of the Nineteenth Century. It gives a relatively solid history of Caddo interaction with the French, Spanish, and Americans, almost totally focused on Louisiana. Its thesis is that the Kadohadacho chieftainship near Natchitoches, Louisiana, was a genuine continuation of the ancient Mississippian culture, something that I have never heard disputed. It uses this thesis to focus pretty much entirely on that topic and its trade and tribute/rations relationship with the succeeding European and American powers. It does an excellent job here, but when it comes to analysis the author makes many sweeping and generalized claims without really supporting them. Though most of these are claims I agree with a few are more difficult to accept. This is all made much harder by endnotes that for the most part only cite primary sources.

For an example of this issue he declares the existence of an Attakappa, Tonkawa, Apache trade network, which may actually have existed but I have never heard of. Now this may have existed by the 1830s or so, the Tonkawas were generally allied to the same Comanches, often is very dramatic and definite ways, as the various Caddo nations at least up to the early 1800s against the Apaches they are supposed to be trading with. This would not be so much of an issue if it had not been introduced as a fact just before describing events of the 1750s. The primary sources cited are unconvincing on this as they are often reporting heresay and seem to disagree with other primary sources I have encountered, that are not cited, and much I have read elsewhere. This is related to another problem of pursuing themes at the expense of chronology and certain failures of context. It is a brief book but I found a remarkable amount of hand waving.

Honestly the book is really more of a 3.5, but my irritation at strained sources and a very sketchy handling of even the theoretical internal dynamics of the various Caddo Great Chiefdoms dragging it doen. And as to Caddo culture, the author assumes considerable knowledge of the culture itself to not bother explaining terms, and if one knows that culture most of the general outline events will already be familiar and it just becomes a list of dates and commercial disputes with some bare bones anthropological analysis.