Aays

Aays belongs to the woodland and prairie country of Texas, where Gulf coastal plain, pine forest, blackland prairie and river routes meet. Caddo communities built mound centers, farmed maize, beans and squash and traded across a wide region. Rivers carried canoes and linked villages to the coast and the Mississippi valley.

Caddo religion and political life centered on temples, ceremonial mounds and chiefly lineages. Villages combined permanent houses with fields, hunting grounds and gathering places. French and Spanish explorers entered the region from opposite directions during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, bringing horses, metal goods and diseases into existing trade networks.

Spanish Texas and French Louisiana competed for the region, while Caddo leaders negotiated alliances and exchange between empires. By 1803 the United States acquired Louisiana, and settlers pressed toward Texas from the east. Aays therefore belonged to a landscape of Caddo towns and river trade before later national boundaries transformed the region. Caddo farmers stored maize in raised granaries. River trade connected mound centers and outlying hamlets. Caddo leaders controlled trade routes. Mound plazas hosted ceremonies. Raised granaries protected seed grain.