Plum Bayou culture is a

Pre-Columbian In the history of the Americas, the pre-Columbian era spans from the original settlement of North and South America in the Upper Paleolithic period through European colonization, which began with Christopher Columbus's voyage of 1492. Usually, ...

Native American culture that lived in what is now east-central

Arkansas Arkansas ( ) is a landlocked state in the South Central United States. It is bordered by Missouri to the north, Tennessee and Mississippi to the east, Louisiana to the south, and Texas and Oklahoma to the west. Its name is from the O ...

from 650–1050 CE,"Plum Bayou Culture."
''The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture.'' (retrieved 26 September 2011) a time known as the Late Woodland Period. Archaeologists defined the culture based on the Toltec Mounds siteOdell 185 and named it for a local waterway.

Relationship to other cultures

The

Baytown culture The Baytown culture was a Pre-Columbian Native American culture that existed from 300 to 700 CE in the lower Mississippi River Valley, consisting of sites in eastern Arkansas, western Tennessee, Louisiana, and western Mississippi. The Baytown Sit ...

(300 to 650 CE) preceded the Plum Bayou culture, and was then followed by early

Mississippian culture The Mississippian culture was a Native American civilization that flourished in what is now the Midwestern, Eastern, and Southeastern United States from approximately 800 CE to 1600 CE, varying regionally. It was known for building large, eart ...

s, which flourished from 900—1600 CE, until diseases brought by Europeans decimated their populations. The Plum Bayou culture had contact with the Coles Creek culture, located along the

Mississippi River The Mississippi River is the List of longest rivers of the United States (by main stem), second-longest river and chief river of the second-largest Drainage system (geomorphology), drainage system in North America, second only to the Hudson B ...

, and early Caddoan cultures, located in river valleys of the Red, Ouachita, and Arkansas Rivers in Arkansas and into

Oklahoma Oklahoma (; Choctaw: ; chr, ᎣᎧᎳᎰᎹ, ''Okalahoma'' ) is a state in the South Central region of the United States, bordered by Texas on the south and west, Kansas on the north, Missouri on the northeast, Arkansas on the east, New ...

. Exotic materials found at Plum Bayou sites reveal trade with the

Ozark Plateau The Ozarks, also known as the Ozark Mountains, Ozark Highlands or Ozark Plateau, is a physiographic region in the U.S. states of Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma and the extreme southeastern corner of Kansas. The Ozarks cover a significant por ...

, West Gulf Coastal Plain, and the

Ouachita Mountains The Ouachita Mountains (), simply referred to as the Ouachitas, are a mountain range in western Arkansas and southeastern Oklahoma. They are formed by a thick succession of highly deformed Paleozoic strata constituting the Ouachita Fold and Thru ...

. Major Plum Bayou sites with single or multiple mounds include: * Baytown Site *

Chandler Landing Site Chandler or The Chandler may refer to: * Chandler (occupation), originally head of the medieval household office responsible for candles, now a person who makes or sells candles * Ship chandler, a dealer in supplies or equipment for ships Arts ...

, Prairie County *

Coy Site The Coy Site ( 3 LN 20) is an archaeological site located next to Indian-Bakers Bayou in Lonoke County, Arkansas. It was inhabited by peoples of the Plum Bayou culture (650—1050 CE), in a time known as the Late Woodland period. The site was o ...

* Dogtown Site * Hayes Site * Maberry Site, Woodruff County *

Roland Site The Roland Site ( 3 AR 30) is an archaeological site located on Dry Lake, an extinct channel of the White River in Arkansas County, Arkansas. It was inhabited intermittently from the beginning of the common era to late prehistoric times, but its ...

* Toltec Mounds

Settlements

Plum Bayou culture was one of the earliest groups to build ceremonial community centers with

platform mound Platform may refer to: Technology * Computing platform, a framework on which applications may be run * Platform game, a genre of video games * Car platform, a set of components shared by several vehicle models * Weapons platform, a system or ...

s and rectangular plazas. They primarily lived in small villages in the uplands and floodplains of the

White White is the lightest color and is achromatic (having no hue). It is the color of objects such as snow, chalk, and milk, and is the opposite of black. White objects fully reflect and scatter all the visible wavelengths of light. White ...

and

Arkansas River The Arkansas River is a major tributary of the Mississippi River. It generally flows to the east and southeast as it traverses the U.S. states of Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. The river's source basin lies in the western United ...

s. Archaeologists divide Plum Bayou settlements into "single household, multiple household, multiple household with mound, and multiple mound sites."

Subsistence

Farmers grew crops such as

amaranth ''Amaranthus'' is a cosmopolitan genus of annual or short-lived perennial plants collectively known as amaranths. Some amaranth species are cultivated as leaf vegetables, pseudocereals, and ornamental plants. Catkin-like cymes of densely p ...

chenopodium ''Chenopodium'' is a genus of numerous species of perennial or annual herbaceous flowering plants known as the goosefoots, which occur almost anywhere in the world. It is placed in the family Amaranthaceae in the APG II system; older classific ...

, bottle gourd, knotweed,

little barley ''Hordeum pusillum'', also known as little barley, is an annual grass native to most of the United States and southwestern Canada. It arrived via multiple long-distance dispersals of a southern South American species of ''Hordeum'' about one m ...

maygrass ''Phalaris caroliniana'' is a species of Poaceae, grass known as Carolina canarygrass and maygrass. Background It is native to the southern United States, and it can be found as a introduced species, naturalized species along the west coast of ...

, squash,

sunflower The common sunflower (''Helianthus annuus'') is a large annual forb of the genus ''Helianthus'' grown as a crop for its edible oily seeds. Apart from cooking oil production, it is also used as livestock forage (as a meal or a silage plant), ...

, and

sumpweed ''Iva annua'', the annual marsh elder or sumpweed, is a North American herbaceous annual plant in the family Asteraceae that was historically cultivated by Native Americans for its edible seed. Description ''Iva annua'' is an annual herb up to ...

. In some later Plum Bayou sites,

maize Maize ( ; ''Zea mays'' subsp. ''mays'', from es, maíz after tnq, mahiz), also known as corn (North American English, North American and Australian English), is a cereal grain first domesticated by indigenous peoples of Mexico, indigenous ...

was cultivated in small amounts. Supplementing their farming, Plum Bayou peoples also hunted game and gathered wild plants, such as cherries, grapes, plums, persimmons, and nuts.

Material culture

This culture is defined in part by its

ceramics A ceramic is any of the various hard, brittle, heat-resistant and corrosion-resistant materials made by shaping and then firing an inorganic, nonmetallic material, such as clay, at a high temperature. Common examples are earthenware, porcelain ...

. Much of Plum Bayou ceramics was plainware, tempered with shells. Named types of ceramics found at Plum Bayou sites include Coles Creek incised var. Keyo, Larto Red, Officer Punctated, and French Fork incised."Notice of Inventory Completion: Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism, Arkansas State Parks."
''National Park Service: Federal Register.'' Vol. 68, No. 228: 66,481—66,482. 26 November 2003 (retrieved 26 September 2011) Red slip, or clay paint, was also used to decorate some ceramic vessels.

Decline

While neighboring cultures adopted maize cultivation and increasingly complex religions and political organization, the Plum Bayou people did not. People continued to occupy the region, but they abandoned their ceremonial sites. The exact descendants of the Plum Bayou culture are not known; however, Quapaw people today are responsible for Plum Bayou human remains and artifacts through the

Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), Pub. L. 101-601, 25 U.S.C. 3001 et seq., 104 Stat. 3048, is a United States federal law enacted on November 16, 1990. The Act requires federal agencies and institutions tha ...

Notes

References

*Odell, George H
''Stone Tools: Theoretical Insights into Human Prehistory.''
New York: Springer, 1996. . {{DEFAULTSORT:Plum Bayou Culture Late Woodland period Archaeological cultures of North America Native American history of Arkansas Mound builders (people) 7th-century establishments in North America 650s establishments