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[...]as a number of theorists point out, explaining continuity during times of considerable social transformation can be more challenging than explaining change.1 By combining extant historical accounts with archaeological site information, material culture, and paleobotanical evidence of environmental changes, we seek to trace the Wichita across prehistory into the contact and colonial era, thereby complementing historians' efforts.2 To better contextualize our findings, we revisit historian Herbert E. Bolton's model of the \"Spanish borderlands\" to demonstrate how a \"decolonized\" borderland model can better explain Native-European relations. [...]the last drafts greatly benefited from the constructive criticisms made by the journal's anonymous reviewers and manuscript editors.

Trade is a prominent activity across much of North America during the Late Prehistoric period. On the Southern Plains, two approaches are used commonly to explain trade during this period. In one, trade is part of a system of economic interdependence between egalitarian societies having very distinct subsistence strategies. In the other, trade reflects the incorporation of Plains societies into macroeconomies centered outside the Plains. I argue that these two approaches inadequately account for Plains trade and are too narrowly constructed to account for the wider trade of which the Plains is a part. As an alternative, I propose that trade develops on the Southern Plains and elsewhere as an internally motivated political activity within the context of widespread and increasing conflict accompanied by substantial spatial rearrangements of people.

The Yellow Creek cache was found on a bluff overlooking a small tributary of the Washita River in central Oklahoma. The cache contained a large number of tools, bifaces, and debitage of Florence-A chert. The source area for Florence-A chert is about 225 km to the northeast in south central Kansas and north central Oklahoma. The cache was created by a bison hunting expedition out of the Lower Walnut focus villages in south central Kansas during the period A.D. 1450-1720. Many of the objects in the cache had somewhat limited future utility but were cached anyway. Important factors behind creation of the cache include disposal of excess materials as well as the availability of lithic raw materials in the home location and the area through which the expedition moved.

Southern Plains archaeologists have for years reported piecemeal data suggesting that ancestors of the Wichita Indians periodically built fortifications. Since 2003, we have conducted archaeological and geophysical investigations at multiple Late Prehistoric and European contact era fortified Wichita sites occupied between about a.d. 1500 and a.d. 1811. We seek to better understand the areal extent, timing, and structural changes associated with facilities that appear to have functioned as redoubts (Drass, Perkins, and Vehik 2018). In this article, we focus on how the Wichita constructed and secured fortification entryways. Given the inherent vulnerability of entryways, architects across the globe have designed a variety of defensive configurations to confound attackers. For the Wichita, the introduction of horses and guns beginning in the 1600s magnified these challenges. Our findings indicate that baffled gates, often paired with fenced extended entryways, facilitated quick entry by defenders and dependents while serving as impediments to hostile intruders.

Compared with late prehistoric archaeological sites attributed to the Wichita, protohistoric sites in Oklahoma contain artifact assemblages indicating that hide processing for trade with French voyageurs became a primary economic activity. Yet aside from assemblage changes, little is understood about how market demand for hides and other animal byproducts altered Wichita social organization, if at all. In this article we investigate polygyny. We examine the hypothesis that in household economies where production depends on women's contributions, market integration intensifies demand on female labor: Where polygyny is practiced, market integration increases the number of wives sought by males, leading to larger families. We compare ethnological data and Blackfoot accounts of polygyny with ethnohistorical and ethnographic information concerning the Wichita. We then review protohistoric Wichita documentary and archaeological data to discuss their strengths and weaknesses for. identifying these social and economic changes.

The present-day Wichita are composed of four subgroups known as the Tawakoni, Wichita, Iscani/Waco, and Taovaya/Tawehash. There has been a tendency in both archaeological and cultural anthropological research to see Wichita culture his ory as if the present-day organization was characteristic of the past. This study argues that the subgroups were distinctand independent social systems in the early Historic, and that the subgroups can be traced into prehistoric times.

A number of Plains archaeological studies address the idea that Dhegihan origins are from archaeological complexes found in the four state area comprised of southeast Kansas, southwest Missouri, northwest Arkansas, and northeast Oklahoma. This study first assesses those arguments using both the archaeological and historical records. The last part of the study discusses the implications of such arguments for Dhegihan material and nonmaterial culture. It is concluded that Dhegihan societies have proven hard to trace archaeologically because they were likely very late in arriving on the Plains. Dhegihan origins are more likely to lie in Oneota or the disintegration of Mississippian tradition societies.

Traditional views of Plains Indian adaptations, both prehistoric and historic, have stressed the need for limited economic interaction between societies. Trade among Plains Indian societies has generally been viewed as having limited economic importance. This study presents an investigation into the economic value of the Late Prehistoric trade in one resource (Florence-A chert). Comparisons are also made to other resources traded across the Plains. Conclusions suggest that the economic value of Plains trade and its impact upon Plains societies has been underestimated.