Mary Beth Trubitt and Ann M. Early (Arkansas Archeological Survey)
Artifact of the Month - April 2019
In the Joint Educational Consortium’s (JEC) Hodges Collection is a large, shallow, flat-bottomed pan with very thick walls (1.2 cm thick), made of clay tempered with coarse mussel shell. With about half the vessel reconstructed, we can see it has a straight, outslanted rim and a circular, flat base. Its opening is an estimated 50 cm in diameter, and it stands about 13.5 cm in height. While we have no locational information for this vessel (Accession 1977-1/X-473), it is the most complete salt pan known from southwest Arkansas. It represents an important Caddo period industry. Caddo Indians in southwest Arkansas used these large shallow pans to boil brine from local saline springs to make salt. They traded salt to other tribes beginning around AD 1100.

It is likely this artifact originally came from 3HS110, the Barkman Salt Works, named after Arkadelphia settler Jacob Barkman, who built a salt production furnace here around 1839. Also in the JEC Hodges Collection, curated by the Arkansas Archeological Survey’s Henderson State University Research Station, are two large salt pan rim sherds provenienced to 3HS110. Arkadelphia amateur archeologist Vere Huddleston remarked on the quantities of salt pan sherds littering the surface at the time of his 1943 visit, and collected “a sack full of sherds.” Dr. and Mrs. Hodges later purchased Huddleston’s collection. During his 1939 Ouachita Valley Survey, Harvard University archeologist Philip Phillips’ assistant visited the Barkman Salt Works, describing two brackish salt lakes.

Fragments of large, thick-walled, flat-bottomed shallow vessels with several shapes have been found at other saltmaking sites in southwest Arkansas. During salvage excavations at Hardman (3CL418) as part of highway construction near Arkadelphia, thousands of small fragments from broken saltpans were found mixed in with household debris. Caddo Indians living at Hardman were intensively processing salt during the Mid-Ouachita phase (ca. AD 1400–1500), and continued this activity into the Social Hill and Deceiper phases (AD 1500–1700) of the Mississippian period.
