Wichita Girl, Kansas, United States

Pre-history
Archaeologists believe that the ancestors of the Wichita have lived in the eastern Great Plains from the Red River north to Nebraska for at least 2,000 years. These early Wichita people were hunters and gatherers who slowly adopted agriculture. About 900 CE on terraces above the Washita and South Canadian Rivers in Oklahoma farming villages began to appear. They grew corn, beans, squash, marsh elder (Iva Annua), and tobacco and hunted deer, rabbits, turkey, and, increasingly, bison, and caught fish and collected mussels in the rivers. These villagers lived in rectangular thatched houses. They became numerous, their villages of up to 20 houses spaced every two or so miles along the rivers. Farming villages were also found in the Texas Panhandle along the Canadian River although in a precarious environment they depended more on bison hunting than agriculture. The Panhandle villagers showed signs of adopting cultural characteristics of the Pueblo peoples of the Rio Grande Valley.
Before 1500 CE, most of the Plains village sites seem to have been abandoned. This may have been because of drought or encroachments on their lands by the newly arrived Apache Indians migrating from the north. Some of the villagers may have migrated north to Kansas where they would become the Quivira found by Coronado in 1541.