The Horton Site
Pottery exposed in excavations at the
Horton site.
The Horton site consists of some 20 acres in the Arkansas
River valley bottomlands in southern Sequoyah County. Excavations
at the site were undertaken in the 1950's when farming exposed burials
and again in the 1960's as part of the salvage of archaeological
sites in the impoundment area of the Robert S. Kerr Lock and Dam.
Eastern Oklahoma was home to people as far back as
9,500 years ago (see the Packard
site in Mayes County). However, about 1,300 years ago, a change
from small, independent bands of hunters and gatherers to more organized,
affiliated groups with a centralized government occurred. The adoption
of farming as a way of life doubtless contributed to this change.
The earliest governing center probably occurred at the Harlan
Mound site in Cherokee County. Over time, the great Spiro
Mounds site supplanted the Harlan site's influence over the
area. Farming villages surrounding the mound centers provided labor
for the building of the great mounds and food to support the priest-chiefs
who lived at the mounds.
The Horton site represents one of the farming villages
under the domain of the Spiro Mounds leaders; its location is about
20 miles upstream from Spiro. The site is believed to have been
occupied between about A.D. 1300 - 1450 at the end of the Spiro
era. The remains of two houses were uncovered during the excavations;
one was a rectangular house, the other a circular house. It is possible
that these two different house patterns represent a change over
time in the kind of house favored by the site's occupants with the
rectangular house favored by earlier people and the circular house
of a later design.
Careful analysis of the surface collections and excavations
at the site also revealed the probable location of some farming
plots of the Horton site people. 300 yards west of the circular
house pattern, archaeologists noticed the presence of many flakes
of a particular stone known as siltstone. This material was favored
by the Horton people for use as hoes and the small siltstone flakes
probably occurred as gardeners stopped their labors to resharpen
their hoes..
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Celts
from the Horton site
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Horton Site arrowpoints
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For further reading:
The Horton Site Revisited, 1967 Excavations at Sq-11, Sequoyah
County, Oklahoma, Studies in Oklahoma's Past, No. 1,
Don G. Wyckoff, Oklahoma Archeological Survey, Norman, 1970.
Number of Prehistoric Sites in Sequoyah
County Identified to Time Period
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