Krieger's Summary of Antelope Creek

The first area investigated was the northern Panhandle of Texas. Here we found a most interesting situation regarding masonry structures in the narrow corridor of the Canadian Valley. After reviewing and drawing together various sources of information, an Antelope Creek Focus was defined and related materials traced through other parts of the Panhandle, principally on its eastern side, and in northeastern New Mexico, southeastern Colorado, and the Oklahoma Panhandle. A southern and western boundary for cord-marked utility pottery with various associated Plains artifacts was drawn (Map 1) and the term Panhandle Aspect proposed to include these remains; it was suggested that other foci in addition to Antelope Creek would be defined in the southern High Plains region. Comparisons were then made in the artifacts of Antelope Creek Focus, Upper Republican Aspect in the central Plains, and Pecos Pueblo in New Mexico, followed by a brief survey of Southwestern architecture made in order to discover the possible origins of Panhandle masonry. The principal results were that Antelope Creek Focus was a Plains culture rather closely akin to Upper Republican in economic life based jointly on maize agriculture and hunting of bison, etc., and in many of the bone and flint implements used; that its architecture, on the other hand, showed certain resemblances to that of north-central New Mexico in Pueblo III times (Largo-Gallina Phase) and Early Pueblo IV times (northern Rio Grande and Jemez area). This circumstance, together with occasional appearance of Puebloan trade sherds datable at circa 1300 to 1450 A.D., in Antelope Creek components, indicated that the latter existed during that period and possibly for a time before trade contacts began. The similarities with Upper Republican, combined with certain lines of reasoning about the age of Upper Republican by Plains archaeologists, made it seem that Antelope Creek Focus was at least partly contemporaneous with this culture. Upper Republican may, however, have been in existence for some time previously, enjoying a longer life than Antelope Creek. The latter seems to have been not only geographically intermediate between Upper Republican and eastern Puebloan cultures, but also to have been a cultural agent through which typical Plains traits reached Pecos Pueblo in early Glaze periods. It was also shown that the Canadian Valley of Texas was abandoned by this agricultural population at about 1450, that there are reasons to believe a protracted drought caused or contributed to this abandonment, and that the Panhandle was inhabited only by nomadic bison hunters, probably Apache, by the time of Coronado’s entrada.

--Krieger 1946, pages 259-260