LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Texas Panhandle: Antelope Creek
built 615 days ago
The villagers who lived in the Texas Panhandle were part of a much larger pattern of semi-settled life in the Great Plains known as the Plains Village tradition. Between roughly A.D. 1100 and 1500, these now-ruined settlements were home to Indian peoples who depended in part on a combination of bison hunting and horticulture (gardening) and staked out their home territories in what is today the Texas Panhandle. Locally, the best-known Plains Village tradition is the Antelope Creek culture centered in the Canadian River Valley not far north and northeast of Amarillo, Texas. Antelope Creek villagers lived in substantial houses sometimes arranged in blocks of rooms somewhat similar to small Southwestern pueblos. They hunted buffalo and other game, collected many kinds of wild plants, grew corn and other crops with simple farming techniques, quarried local materials such as Alibates flint, and otherwise settled the land and made it their home for centuries.
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The Texas Panhandle—its eastern edge descending sharply from the plains into the canyons of Palo Duro, Tule, Quitaque, Casa Blanca, and Yellow House—is as rich in history as it is in natural beauty. Long considered a crossroads of ancient civilizations, the twenty-six northernmost Texas counties lie on the southern reaches of the Great Plains, where numerous dry creek beds and the Canadian River have carved the region appropriately named the High Plains.
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The BNSF Panhandle Subdivision stretches from Amarillo, Texas east to Wellington, Kansas. It's approximately 123 miles from Amarillo to the Texas-Oklahoma state line near Higgins. East of Amarillo, territory is straight and flat (and parallel to US Highway 60) for about the first 50 miles to Pampa. East of Pampa, the tracks drop down from the eastern edge of the Llano Estacado and enter the Canadian River drainage. East of Pampa, the railroad is out of sight from Hwy 60, although there are a few stretches near Miami and Canadian where the railroaad and the highway are close together. East of Pampa, you'll find the Texas Panhandle vastly different from the table-flat plains of the Llano Estacado; the tracks twist and bend around hillsides and alongside creeks which drain into the Canadian River, and trains encounter grades of close to 1 percent as they climb out of the Canadian River Valley.
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Beginning in the early 1930s, Studer speculatively identified what he felt were close architectural parallels between the houses he and others excavated at Antelope Creek 22 and other Panhandle sites with Southwestern Pueblos. Among these were what he called ventilator shafts, stone deflectors, sipapus (symbolic spirit holes), and kivas (underground ritual or assembly rooms). Although there is little doubt that Antelope Creek villagers did incorporate some broad architectural ideas from Southwestern peoples, Studer consistently downplayed or ignored the equally compelling architectural similarities with Plains Village sites up and down the Plains. Studer’s Southwestern bias can still be seen today in the scale model reconstruction of the Antelope Creek 22 ruin that is on display at the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum. Under his direction, WPA workers reconstructed the site as a Southwestern Pueblo complete with flat roofs, roof entries, and attached kivas. Today few experts accept this reconstruction, because there is little convincing evidence for the existence of kivas, sipapus, or flat roofs with roof entries in Antelope Creek architecture.
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Antelope Creek