Archaeology Magazine - May/June 2024 - 43

A bison scapula hoe discovered at the
Wichita site of Bryson-Paddock in
A
northern Oklahoma is of a type that was
used to dig fortifications.
no
u
th h that had become lost. " Outside of our oral history, "
woven grass and reeds that rendered them watertight.
Standing in the middle of many later villages were seemingly
impenetrable fortifications composed of wooden
palisades, circular ditches, and defensible entryways that
surrounded subterranean vaults. In the southern Great Plains,
the Wichita were the only Indigenous people known to
have lived in large permanent villages with these kinds of
forts, which were so complex that early Spanish explorers
falsely assumed them to be of European origin. Because these
substantial fortifications are so rare, archaeologists are only
just beginning to understand how and why the Wichita
built them. Ongoing research conducted by University of
Oklahoma archaeologists Richard Drass and Susan Vehik,
along with archaeologist Stephen Perkins of Oklahoma State
University, has connected the forts to the explosive growth
of the Great Plains bison trade and the need for the Wichita
to protect their newfound wealth from enemy incursions.
During the summer of 2004, the team began excavating at
Bryson-Paddock, a Wichita village on the Arkansas River in
Oklahoma near the Kansas border. This 35-acre settlement,
which was occupied from 1680 to 1756, served as an important
waypoint for both Native and European traders. In 1749, a group
of French traders traveling between Louisiana and New Mexico
spent several weeks at Bryson-Paddock. During their stay, they
took detailed notes about everyday life and the layout of the community.
This provided an intriguing opportunity for the team to
compare archaeological evidence with a 250-year-old firsthand
description of a Wichita village-although they weren't expecting
to find a fort. " There was never a fort officially recorded there, "
Drass says. During the excavation, the archaeologists recovered
thousands of artifacts, including metal trade items such as firearms,
knives, and nails, along with traditional Indigenous tools
including chipped-stone scrapers used to process bison hides.
While mapping a well-preserved section of the site using a suite
of noninvasive techniques such as ground-penetrating radar and
electrical resistivity, however, the team was surprised to find the
outlines of circular ditches belonging to a large fortification.
The discovery of the fort at Bryson-Paddock inspired a
collaboration between the archaeologists and the Wichita,
who have a rich oral tradition that speaks of villages in their
homeland, but not specifically of fortifications. To Wichita
Cultural Program Planner Gary McAdams, excavating the
fort offered a chance to recover a part of the Wichita's past
archaeology.org
he says, " archaeology is the source of much of our knowledge
about how and where our ancestors lived. " The absence of
forts in traditional memory is likely due to the fact that in
the mid-1800s, a large proportion of the Wichita people died
from disease, starvation, and violent encounters with American
settlers. When the tribe was moved to the Wichita Indian
Reservation in the summer of 1867, only 822 people were
counted by the government census, down from what scholars
estimate was a population of 200,000 in the sixteenth century.
T
he confederation of the Waco, Taovaya,
Tawakoni, Kichai, and Wichita that today constitutes
the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes likely formed
sometime in the early 1400s, although the Wichita's history
stretches back to people who lived in settlements throughout
the southern Great Plains in the first millennium a.d. " Our
ancestors inhabited a region from central Kansas to Waco,
Texas, " says McAdams. These ancestral Wichita lived in
small villages and had begun to cultivate maize, beans,
and squash. Beginning around a.d. 950, a climatic episode
known as the Medieval Warm Period brought warmer and
drier conditions to the Great Plains. " By about 1000 to 1100,
we see a change in climatic conditions that favored more
intensive crop cultivation, " says Drass. " At this time, we see
the growth of settlements from a few houses to twenty or
more along large river systems. " Within a period of a few
hundred years, ancestral Wichita had settled in thousands of
villages throughout the southern Great Plains.
In addition to impacting the farming practices of the
ancestral Wichita, the Medieval Warm Period resulted in
a significant increase in the number of bison roaming the
continent. The higher average temperatures and reduced seasonal
rainfall brought on by the climatic anomaly expanded
the range of the shortgrass prairie, which could sustain
KANSAS
Bryson-Paddock
Deer Creek Site
OKLAHOMA
Duncan Site
TEXAS
Longest Site
Wichita and Affiliated
Tribes Reservation
75
150 miles
43
Red River
Arkansas River
Canadian River
Washita River
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Archaeology Magazine - May/June 2024

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