Caddo Mounds State Historic Site

“Caddo temporality recognizes that we do not see the past, present, and future as disaggregate, but more of a multidimensional cascade of overlaying experiences.” - Lauren Toho-Murrow Haupt, Indigenous Anthropologist and Caddo Citizen 

The Caddo Mounds Historic Site project in East Texas is guided by the voices, knowledge, and priorities of Caddo Citizens, for whom this has been a sacred landscape since time immemorial. In close collaboration with the Texas Historical Commission, the process centers Indigenous worldviews in which land, ecology, history, and community are inseparable. A braided approach brings Caddo knowledge into dialogue with contemporary landscape design, while archival research, ecological study, and deep listening with Caddo Knowledge Keepers and Elders inform strategies that honor ceremony, improve safety and access, and sustain the site’s living cultural and ecological systems.

This series of graphics explores relationships among people, plants, animals, water, seasons, ceremony, and patterns of movement and settlement. The drawings reveal the landscape not as a backdrop to history, but as an active participant in Caddo life and culture. By translating research and shared knowledge into visual narratives from an Indigenous Caddo perspective, these studies became tools for dialogue and collective understanding, establishing a common foundation from which the plan’s vision and conceptual designs could emerge.