IN SOUTHWESTERN OKLAHOMA, between the Washita and Canadian Rivers, the Wichita Reservation spreads across some 700,000 acres of grassland. The Wichita, known in their own language as the Kitikiti’sh, or Eminent Ones, are today made up of five bands that include some 3,000 enrolled members who can trace their lineage on the Great Plains back more than 1,000 years. In their earliest permanent settlements, the Wichita people built small mud-plastered homes, while later Wichita constructed large beehive-shaped grass lodges that could comfortably sleep up to 12 people. Framed by wooden poles and branches, the exteriors of these later houses were reinforced with intricately 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
