Historical Marker
Antelope Creek Ruins
Hutchinson County · Texas
Erected 1997
Archeologists group sites like these as the Antelope Creek phase, part of the Plains Village horizon of bison-hunting farming villages that stretched from north Texas to North Dakota. The Handbook of Texas says these and the related Buried City sites on Wolf Creek were the only Plains Village societies to build contiguous-room stone villages. Trade grew sharply after about 1350, bringing Pueblo pottery, obsidian, turquoise and shell. Springs fed by the Ogallala Aquifer sustained the villages through drought until worse drought and the arrival of Apachean groups ended them about 1500.
What the plaque says
Plains Village Native Americans occupied a series of interconnected rock dwellings near here from about 1200-1500. Called "Texas' first apartment house," the ruins have been the focus of numerous excavations through the years. Made of native dolomite, the rock and slab dwellings averaged about 12 feet by 15 feet in size with a single opening, a long crawlway, on the east side. Other rooms contained a central hearth under four roof-support posts, while smaller rooms were thought to be for storage. Adobe platforms may have been an altar for ceremonial purposes. The ruins are located near a branch of the Canadian River, providing a perennial source of water. The creek bottom soil of sandy loam allowed residents to harvest crops including corn, beans, squash and pumpkin. The semi-sedentary natives also hunted bison, antelope, deer, and small animals as evidenced by the bones and tools found at the site. Artifacts recovered include small arrow points, beveled and oval knives, bone implements, grinding stones, and cord marked ceramics. Considerable information on the artifact assemblage and village structure was gained from the Works Progress Administration excavations from 1938-41 and subsequent interpretive works in 1946. (1997)
Where it stands
35.62474, -101.53526 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Lake Meredith National Recreation Area — 3.1 miA Canadian River reservoir in 200-foot breaks, built to water the Panhandle's cities, that fell to a record 26 feet deep in 2013 and still rises and falls with the drought.
- Hutchinson County Museum — 8.8 miBorger's museum on the three-mile Main Street of a 1926 oil boom town that drew 45,000 people in ninety days and was put under martial law in 1929.
- Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument — 10.0 miHand-dug pits on a mesa above the Canadian River where people quarried banded flint for thousands of years and traded it across the Plains, seen on a ranger-led climb.
- Carson County Square House Museum — 21 miThe 1880s ranch cottage that is the oldest house in the town of Panhandle, at the heart of a twenty-one-building museum of the plains from mammoth hunters to the oil boom.