Two Caddo Mound Sites in Arkansas is an excellent study of two contemporaneous mound sites on the periphery of the Caddo cultural area and the Mississippian sphere in west-central Arkansas. The two mound centers that are the focus of the manuscript, Hughes (3SA11) and Hedges (3HS60), are situated in adjacent drainages of the Saline and Ouachita Rivers, respectively, with similar near-mound timber-frame buildings that were burned and covered in midden deposits. This book will be a fantastic addition to the libraries and shelves of professional archaeologists, students, and those interested in the history of Caddoan and Mississippian peoples of Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas. Mary Beth Trubitt's goals for this research report are establishing a temporal framework for these and similar sites nearby, generating better understandings of activity patterns, and recognizing patterns of community identities in borderlands of Mississippian and Caddoan areas during the Middle Caddo (AD 1200–1400) and Late Caddo (AD 1400–1600) periods.

The monograph is organized into seven chapters that are richly detailed with photographs of fieldwork, artifacts, and maps from excavations conducted at the Hughes and Hedges sites during 1973–1974 and in 2002 by the Arkansas Archeological Survey (AAS) research station at Henderson State University. The first chapter summarizes the environmental and archaeological backgrounds to the investigations at the Hughes and Hedges sites. This chapter serves as the basis for the following discussions of the recovered data and their implications for interpretation of the Caddo/Mississippian borderland. These contemporaneous sites, located in adjacent drainages, have similar site plans, similar zooarchaeological assemblages, and similar pottery assemblages. Chapter 1 emphasizes the implications of materials from these sites as clues about life and community identity in settings near the edges of Mississippian (to the north and east) and Caddoan (to the south and west) culture areas.

In Chapters 2 and 3, Trubitt discusses details about the background to investigations of these sites; procedures and processes of survey, mapping, and excavations; and descriptions and discussions of site stratigraphy and radiocarbon dates. Hughes (3SA11) is a two-stage mound site investigated since the late 1880s and added to the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) in 1985. The site's location on the margin of the Caddo area offered opportunities to explore the social identity and ethnicity of the people who inhabited the site as well as interactions between the periphery of the Caddo area and the Mississippian sphere. The Hedges site includes two low mounds and associated burned structures offering a point of comparison with Hughes. These structures appear to have been burned intentionally, probably as a means of “closing” the structures themselves, which were then covered with midden.

Chapter 4 is a comparative consideration of pottery from both sites. The chapter discusses the methods of analysis, temper and decorative motif comparisons, and vessel form and function. These analyses are intriguing given the similarities in temper (predominantly shell), but they are distinguished from one another in surface decorations and motifs. Chapter 5 discusses the lithic artifacts uncovered at the sites. The richly detailed discussion of lithic raw materials, processes of pottery manufacture and process, projectile point typologies, ground stone, and ornaments elaborates on their use within these Caddo communities. Additionally, these artifacts place the sites in temporal and cultural frameworks, allowing for better understandings of activity patterns in near-mound areas of these sites as a point of comparison with other regional sites from the heartlands of Caddo and Mississippian cultural areas.

Chapter 6 details the organic materials from Hughes and Hedges and was written by Lucretia S. Kelly and Mary Beth Trubitt. The faunal analysis was conducted exclusively at Hughes, and I look forward to a comparative analysis between these sites in the future. Chapter 7, which concludes the book, compares the spatial layouts and architecture and activity areas at these sites, and it provides some discussion of the broader implications of this study. It discusses the spatial layout of the two communities, interprets the timing and patterning of activities that took place there, and infers cultural connections between them and with neighboring regions.

This book is another valuable contribution from the AAS report series by the Arkansas Archeological Survey (AAS). Excavations at Hughes and Hedges, and analyses of materials from those sites, broadly speak to the importance of food preparation, construction practices, and crafting activities that were so important to the peoples who lived there during the 1500s–1600s. Linking the activities of the ancestral Caddo peoples to Caddo peoples of the present are the ornaments, paints, dyes, and rattles that are integral to modern Caddo gatherings. By linking these places to contemporary Caddo peoples, descendants of those who lived there in the past—and during what archaeologists refer to as the Middle Caddo and Late Caddo periods—Trubitt makes for a compelling link between the past and present. Her monograph leaves us looking forward to exciting future contributions from these sites for understanding past foodways and other aspects of ancestral Caddo ways of life.