Antelope Creek phase

The Antelope Creek phase was an American Indian culture in the Texas panhandle and adjacent Oklahoma dating from AD 1200 to 1450.

[6] A major asset of the Canadian River Valley was the large deposits of colorful Alibates flint that could be chipped into tools and weapons and traded to other cultures.

The opinion of most archaeologists is that the Antelope Creek people spoke a Caddoan language and were probably ancestors of the historic Wichita and affiliated tribes, possibly, the Pawnee.

An alternative thesis is that the Antelope Creek people were Pueblo Indians who moved or were pushed onto the Great Plains from their homes near the valley of the Rio Grande in New Mexico.

Here contact was established with Puebloans who were expanding their territories at the same time.”[9] The unique and enigmatic characteristic of Antelope Creek was the construction of large stone-slab and plaster houses and one-story apartment blocks.

[11] Houses typically consisted of an east-facing vestibule leading to a single square room recessed about one foot (30 cm) into the ground.

Four upright wooden posts near the center of the dwelling held up the roof which was probably sloped and made of intertwined straw and saplings.

Although some Antelope Creek people lived in the multi-family dwellings, more often they clustered in hamlets of individual homes with a population of not more than eight families.

The water of the Canadian River is salty, so the Antelope Creek people often lived where streams had cut 100 to 200 feet deep into the caprock.

[15] The evidence points to a three-faceted strategy for subsistence among the Antelope Creek people: (1) hunting bison and other animals; (2) cultivation of maize, beans, squash, and sunflowers; and (3) foraging for edible nuts, fruits, and seeds.

Although bison were their most important prey, the bones of deer, antelope, and smaller game have also been found in the ruins, plus a few mussels and fish.

The Texas Panhandle is a marginal area for unirrigated agriculture, prone to drought and with the bulk of the 16- to 20-inch annual rainfall coming in a few thunderstorms that cause flooding.

Among the wild foods eaten were acorns, hackberries, mesquite, buckwheat, plums, persimmons, prickly pear, mallow, cattail, purslane, goosefoot, knotweed, domesticated marshelder, and bulrush.

When Spanish conquistador Francisco Vásquez de Coronado passed through the Texas Panhandle in 1541 he met only nomadic and semi-nomadic buffalo-hunting Indians he called Querechos (Apache) and Teyas (possibly Caddoan).

Whatever the reason, most archaeologists speculate that the Antelope Creek people migrated eastward to Kansas and Oklahoma and become the Wichita and affiliated tribes, whom Coronado met in Quivira in 1541.