Horses in Early Wichita Communities: New Evidence from the Little Deer Site

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Columbian Exchange Revisited: Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives on Eurasian Domesticates in the Americas" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In North America, the southern Plains exchange system after 1600 CE was a complicated and fiercely competitive network of fluid alliances, rival interests, and conflict in the middle of overlapping Southeastern and Southwestern cultural, economic, and physical power bases. Within this system, the Wichita people occupied physical and social spaces between different environments, exchange networks, Indigenous groups, and eventually European colonies for generations, controlling the passage of goods, people, and knowledge through their territories. Horses played a critical role in these exchange systems. During the eighteenth-century, Wichita villages served as major Indigenous-controlled centers of the horse trade in a region that lacked the establishment of official European posts or an extensive rendezvous system. However, much of what we know about horses in Wichita communities comes from accounts of Euroamerican colonizers or from the perspective of their more mobile allies and trade partners, which often downplay the significance of horses to the Wichita, as well as undermine their antiquity. This paper presents the results of our re-analysis of faunal remains from a seventeenth-century Wichita village called Little Deer in west-central Oklahoma. This work provides new evidence that horses may have reached the Wichita earlier than previously believed.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Columbian Exchange Revisited: Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives on Eurasian Domesticates in the Americas   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37917.0