Southern Plains villagers

rdf:langString Southern Plains villagers

rdf:langString The Southern Plains villagers were semi-sedentary Native Americans who lived on the Great Plains in western Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, and southeastern Colorado from about AD 800 until AD 1500. Also known as Plains Villagers, the people of this pre-Columbian culture cultivated maize and other crops, hunted bison and other game, and gathered wild plants for food. The people generally lived in hamlets of a few dwellings adjacent to flood plains of rivers such as the Washita and South Canadian Rivers in Oklahoma and Texas. Thousands of hamlets have been identified. The Southern Plains villagers were likely the ancestors, at least in part, of the historic Wichita and other Caddoan peoples. Some of the Southern Plains Villagers survived into the historic era in the 16th century when Spanish explorers first ventured onto the Great Plains. The Wichita's first contact with Europeans was in 1541 when they were visited by Francisco Coronado in Kansas. The semi-agrarian economy of the Southern Plains villagers was always vulnerable due to frequent droughts and climatic variations, although the livelihood of the villagers was enhanced by the periodic abundance of bison. The Southern Plains villagers, especially on their western fringe, were influenced by the agricultural Ancestral Pueblo peoples of the Rio Grande River Valley of New Mexico. They traded bison meat, robes, and stones for tools to the Ancestral Pueblos on their west and to the Caddoans on their east for maize, pottery, and Osage orange wood for making bows. Archaeologists have divided the Southern Plains villagers into many different archaeological variants based on differences in what has been found of their material possessions. The Redbud Plains variant includes the Paoli, Washita River, Custer, and Turkey Creek phases of western Oklahoma; the Henrietta and Wylie Creek focuses are located in north-central Texas; the Upper Canark variant in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles includes the Antelope Creek Phase, and the Buried City and Zimms complexes; the Apishapa phase in southeastern Colorado; and the Bluff Creek, Wilmore, and Pratt complexes are in south central Kansas. The proto-historic Wichita villages in central Kansas are called the Great Bend aspect.