The Pearson Site (41RA5) at Lake Tawakoni on the Sabine River, Rains County, Texas

Abstract

The Pearson site (41RA5) in the Blackland Prairie of East Texas is one of a number of aboriginal archaeological sites recorded during a 1957 archaeological survey of the flood pool of then proposed Lake Tawakoni on the Sabine River; the site is now inundated. The Pearson site was located on several low sandy rises across ca. 25 acres in the Hooker Creek-Sabine River floodplain, and these rises had both aboriginal and European artifacts on the surface. Johnson and Jelks, and Duffield and Jelks have argued that the Pearson site was the Tawakoni-Yscani village visited by a Spanish missionary in 1760 and part of a recently defined Norteno focus, a complex of sites apparently associated with the Wichita tribes. Schambach, by contrast, considers the Pearson site to be an 18th century Tunican entrepot.