Members of the Caddo, Osage, and Quapaw nations will join Arkansas Archeological Survey staff in this project to investigate art, ritual, and social interaction among Carden Bottoms phase communities and their neighbors living in adjacent central Mississippi Valley and Ouachita Mountain/Gulf Coastal Plain regions. This investigation will employ modern remote sensing technologies to identify non-mortuary features at known Carden Bottoms phase sites. Excavation of those features will produce information on the occupational history of the sites that will, in turn, provide a better context for studying collections of whole ceramic vessels and other artifacts looted from Carden Bottoms cemeteries during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Analysis of the combined collections will shed new light on the American Indian history of central Arkansas River Valley during the centuries leading up to contact with the first European explorers.