Southern Plains villagers
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.
[3] 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.
[5] In the opinion of archaeologists, the Southern Plains villagers were likely, in whole or part, speakers of Caddoan languages, the ancestors of the historical Wichita, Kichai, and possibly the Pawnee.
The apparent Caddoan origin of the villagers, however, does not preclude the possibility of non-Caddoan speakers and linguistic and ethnic diversity in the region.
[6] Three technological developments in the early centuries of the Common Era led to the replacement of nomadic hunter-gatherer cultures by semi-sedentary cultures on the Southern Great Plains: the replacement of spears and the atlatl by the bow and arrow, a more efficient tool for hunting; the introduction of pottery for storage and cookery; and the adoption of maize agriculture as a major source of food.
[8] These people cultivated maize and indigenous marsh elder, hunted and caught deer, rabbits, fish, and mussels, and gathered edible wild plants such as Chenopodium (goosefoot or lambs-quarters), amaranth, sunflower, little barley, maygrass, dropseed, and erect knotweed.
As cultivation of maize, beans, and squash, the "Three Sisters" of Native American agriculture, expanded, use of earlier indigenous crops declined.
[14] The people of the Canark variant grew maize, beans, squash, and probably sunflowers in addition to hunting (mainly bison) and gathering wild food plants.
The drought-prone area they occupied is marginal for agriculture without irrigation and the bulk of its 16 to 24 inches annual rainfall arrived in a few thunderstorms that cause flooding.
[15] The Apishapa Phase in southeastern Colorado dates from 900 to 1400 and is characterized by stone slab architecture, often in defensible positions on mesas.
Agriculture, however, was probably relatively unimportant due to the semiarid climate and the rocky canyons and dry mesas where many Apishapa dwellings have been found.
Along the Arkansas River in northernmost Oklahoma is the Uncas site, which is quite different than the others in the character of its dwellings and pottery and possibly represents an intrusion of unrelated people.
The Teyas he found east of present day Lubbock, Texas might also have been Apaches, or perhaps the Caddoan descendants of the Southern Plains villagers.
Both the Quivirans and Rayados were living more than 200 miles east and in much more favorable climates for agriculture than where maize and other crops had been grown by the Southern Plains villagers hundreds of years earlier.
