Buried City: Village Life Along Wolf Creek

• Investigations
• Settlement
• Architecture
• Life
• Who Lived at Buried City?
• Credits & Sources

The "Buried City" of the Texas Panhandle is not, in fact, the remains of a city, but it is one of the most densely settled archeological districts in the Southern Plains. Packed into a few short miles of narrow Wolf Creek valley are more than 100 known habitation sites with the remains of houses mainly built by Plains Villagers between about A.D. 1200 to A.D. 1400. It is very likely that many other less-obvious (and perhaps earlier) pithouses lie buried within the Wolf Creek Valley. Buried City or not, the name has stuck and can refer both to the settlement zone along Wolf Creek and to the Plains Village culture that called this place home 700 years ago.

Since the 1920s Buried City has been equated with one or another surrounding prehistoric cultures including the Pueblo "Cliff Dwellers" of the American Southwest, the Antelope Creek villagers of the Canadian River, and the Woodland "Mound Builders" of the Kansas City area and points further east. Today the facts, as we see them, don't fit any of these notions. Instead, investigations over the past two decades have shown that Buried City was part of a distinct culture of its own, one of a growing number of variations on the Plains Village theme that archeologists now recognize.

The people of the Buried City practiced horticulture, a form of low-intensity gardening that led to full-scale agriculture in other areas. They grew corn and probably squash, beans, and other crops. But they were also buffalo hunters and hunters of deer and other game. And they harvested wild fruits, seeds, flowers, and other plant foods. For more than three centuries, people lived, worked, planted, and harvested crops, hunted, and died along this small stretch of Wolf Creek in what is today the Texas Panhandle.

This exhibit summarizes what we now know about the Buried City and the villagers who lived there. Below is an introduction to the natural setting of the Wolf Creek Valley. In other exhibit sections you can learn about the History of Investigations, Buried City Settlement, Buried City Architecture, Traces of Life, Buried City Reconsidered, and Credits and Sources.

Natural Setting

To understand a people, you need to understand the place where they lived, how they lived, and the limits the natural world imposed upon them. People who first encounter the High Plains of the northern Texas Panhandle today think of it in terms of a boundless expanse of grass, wheat, and cattle. Its most remarkable feature is that it is billiard-table flat: you can see the clump of trees miles before you get close to a modern farmstead. The other striking feature, literally, is the wind. The normal southwest (spring and summer) or northwest (fall and winter) breezes blow at 5 to 15 miles per hour day and night and then there are the windy days when it really howls. To natives of the Panhandle, the more remarkable moments are those rare days when the wind is NOT blowing.

On paper, the annual rainfall of 16 to 20 inches makes the area seem ideal for grain agriculture, but much of that rainfall typically comes in only a half-dozen torrential thundershowers in the late spring. Because the area is dry most of the year, water is a constant concern. On the High Plains the scattered playa lakes (round, natural depressions that formed tens of thousands of years ago) hold some water from the spring rains through much of the summer, but in dry times access to water becomes a problem. The best water available comes from the Pliocene age Ogallala geological formation that forms the caprock of the Texas Panhandle. Depth from the modern surface to the water-bearing part of the Ogallala varies from less than 100 feet to over 200 feet. The major stream valleys have in many instances cut down into the Ogallala, providing access to freshwater springs along the margins of their valleys.

Because of this geography and climate, few prehistoric peoples lived on the high plains. Rather, they lived along the streams that cut across the High Plains, streams like the Canadian River and Wolf Creek. These stream valleys provide access to spring water from the Ogallala, a much wider variety of plants and animals than the short-grass prairies of the High Plains provide, and shelter from the winds. Such places are truly oases on the plains.

Wolf Creek is among the most inviting of these spring-fed riverine retreats on the High Plains. As Eyerly put it in 1907:

Because Wolf Creek flows west to east, its narrow, entrenched valley offers shelter from the prevailing southwest and north winds. In prehistory Wolf Creek was attractive to game of all sorts, the stream contained several varieties of fish and shellfish, and the banks supported dense woods. Although they are all but gone today, the narrow stream-side forests along Wolf Creek and other parallel drainages are the westernmost fingers of the Eastern Woodlands, narrow ribbons that stood in woody contrast to the grassy High Plains.

People probably first visited this idyllic setting during Paleoindian times, although no definitive evidence of this is known. Scattered finds of Archaic artifacts show that people have been spending time along Wolf Creek since at least 6,000 years ago and there is evidence of at least intermittent occupation throughout the remaining prehistoric era. Archeological investigations have focused on the latest of these prehistoric occupants: the Plains villagers of about 600-1000 years ago. These people lived along the banks of Wolf Creek on a year-round basis. They made several kinds of houses including dwellings with stick and post walls built on the unimproved ground surface, small houses built over or in small, shallow pits, and large houses with boulder wall bases and massive central supports. These latter houses are what have lured archeologists into the Wolf Creek valley for the past hundred years. Advances in remote sensing technology have begun to make it feasible to locate and explore the more ephemeral and less obvious houses, of which there are probably a great many.