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Trade and Travel at Toltec

 

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The first platform mound builders in Arkansas, and among the first in the Southeast, were the Plum Bayou people of the Toltec site. Between A.D. 750 and A.D. 950 they dominated east central Arkansas from their great political and religious center, the Toltec mound group southeast of Little Rock. The Plum Bayou people were in touch with the early Caddo people of southwest Arkansas, with people of Louisiana and the Gulf Coast as far east as Florida, with people up the Arkansas Valley as far as Fort Smith, and probably with people to the north in the Mississippi Valley near St. Louis. A plain bowl of the Plum Bayou culture is shown here. Most of the pottery the Plum Bayou people made was undecorated, but a small percentage of it was painted red inside and out. (Courtesy Arkansas Archeological Survey).

The Plum Bayou people lived mainly on the old Southeastern staples of hickory nuts, acorns, fish and game, plus some of the more recently developed plants of the eastern agricultural complex including maygrass, little barley, lamb's quarter, squash, and possibly sunflowers. To this complex of foods they added two very important new plants, long since domesticated in Mexico, corn and beans. It is likely that corn and beans and information on how to grow them came to the Southeast along with the ideas that stimulated the building of temple mounds.(Courtesy Arkansas Archeological Survey).

 

 

Arrow points of novaculite and chert from the Plum Bayou culture. It is apparent from the size of these specimens that the Plum Bayou people had the bow and arrow. (Courtesy Arkansas Archeological Survey)