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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.

Studying the flow patterns and behaviour of double baffled gates under different flow heads is important to improve their performance, which could help in widening the range of their application. In the present study, physical and numerical investigations were conducted on the double baffled gate. A 3D Acoustic Doppler Velocity Meter (ADV) was used for laboratory measurements of the instantaneous velocity fields in the physical gate model. In parallel with this, the CFD Fluent package was adopted to carry out a sensitivity analysis for a matrix of geometric parameters of the double baffled gate. The outcomes of the laboratory and CFD numerical investigations were incorporated in a spreadsheet with the purpose of informing the design of double baffled gates under conditions of non-submergence.