Prehistoric cultures in the Texas Panhandle are one of the most enigmatic features of the Great Plains, largely existent but hidden from all but the most fortunate, the most curious and the academically astute. The remaining evidence is largely limited to severely deteriorated dwellings left by the Antelope Creek phase cultures, lithic artifacts such as arrowheads and other rock tools exposed by erosion, and rock carvings, known as petroglyphs.

   Petroglyphs are the most commonly found communique from the Antelope Creek phase and are often referred to as rock carvings. They are defined as



and were created by cultures that had no written language. Since there is currently no true consensus among experts as to what prehistoric civilizations thought on a local or regional cultural level, a significant understanding of their superstitions or deep understandings of their ways of life is open to speculation. Much is known about their daily habits but the fact that they didn't communicate and record the past with complex and abstract methods left very little by which to communicate to their modern successors. Today, our post-Columbian curiosity about the past has forced us to create such fields of science as archaeology, anthropology, or paleoclimatology, "the study of climate change taken on the scale of the entire history of the Earth," 2 allow us to communicate with the Earth's past in order to understand it. We must understand past civilizations in much the same way: we are forced to communicate with those individuals and cultures who lived before us but didn't intentionally leave records for us.

    The Antelope Creek phase (1150 - 1450 AD) of the Plains Village horizon, those believed responsible for creating most of the petroglyphs in the Texas Panhandle area, were a regional historical anomaly. They left tangible but very vague archaeological evidence that shows us who they were, what they did in their daily lives and how they lived. The symbols that they carved into dolomite rock and other more portable art are what we go on when questions of beliefs and rituals need to be answered. For a more clear understanding we can largely compare them to contemporaneous Native cultures in adjacent regions; more easily so than with the Archaic cultures that preceded them: they were similar to other prehistoric communities in North America. Certainly though, the local knowledge they had of such things as plants with healing qualities, might possibly have came from their regional predecessors. Adjacent groups like theMississippian Woodlands cultures and the southwestern Anasazi left behind some of the same signs of their ways of life as the Antelope Creek complex. Some believe that due to their similarities with the Mississippian Woodlands complex, that may have been their origin. The fact that they lived as they did, in formal, built up dwellings, perhaps cultivating the soil, carrying out formal rituals, mining the flint from Alibates and Plum Creek, trading with other prehistoric communities across the continent, creating cord-marked pottery and portable trinkets such as beads and hand decorated pipes for smoking tobacco, tells modern investigators that they were closer to us in the modern, formal institutional structures like family, politics, economics and religion. This allows us to learn much more about them than do the absence of cultural manifestations from the Clovis or subsequent Archaic peoples who mostly wandered as simple hunter-gatherers. The Antelope Creek phase traded and communicated with other civilizations, to the four corners of the continent. Objects made of materials found only in the southwest or the northern regions have been found in the Alibates area and conversely, objects found in the surrounding regions made of Alibates flint could have come from only one place.

    Cultures and civilizations prior to the semi-sedentary Antelope Creek phase like the Clovis or Archaic era groups were nomadic and didn't create complex and formally structured dwellings. They lived in the open for the most part, or took advantage of naturally shaped shelters or built and transported simple shelters made from light weight structural components and animal skins. The Apachaeans, who replaced the Antelope Creek phase by about 1500 AD, were nomadic as well and had no use for semi-permanent structures. They seemed to regress and take a step backward. They preferred to carry their dwellings from place to place or to build temporary ones upon arrival as they constantly sought food and resources for survival. The bow and arrow wasn't introduced into hunting in North America until about 800 AD, several thousand years after it's discovery ( perhaps 8000 BC ) on other continents, thus improvements in standards of living, beyond the bow and arrow and refinements in arrowhead points, were few and far between. Not until the reintroduction of the horse and the importation iron ore technology to the North American continent by the Spanish did native civilizations, like the Comanches who arrived in the Panhandle area about 1700 AD, have the impetus to advance. But by then, the introducer, the Anglo European, meant to put an end to comparatively backward cultures.






    Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument sits on the southeastern bank of the Canadian River about 25 miles northeast of Amarillo, Texas. It is significant for it's large quantities of chert, or flint, deposits that have been used for centuries by prehistoric people as tools. For more information on Alibates Flint and it's geological history, please refer to an article by Wes Phillips that can be found here:
http://www.panhandlenation.com/explore/alibates2.htm

    The rock carvings, or petroglyphs, that are part of the Alibates site of the Antelope Creek complex sit at the far edge of a ridge line above the Canadian River about one hundred yards west of the dwelling sites, which are situated atop the caprock and split by a shallow ravine that eventually empties into the river below. The flint quarries sit about 1/4 mile to the northeast from the dwelling sites along a ridge line about 1/2 mile south of the flood plain of the Canadian River.

    The petroglyphs are carved into various large stones of dolomite and are naturally situated atop a short cliff above the river breaks in a small amphitheater-like, quarter-arc shape that faces generally due north with the open side of the arc facing south. With the dwelling sites to the right, or back and to the east, the quarries forward and to the right, and the Canadian River to the north less than a mile away, the petroglyph "gallery" occupies a central location in a relationship to the main social institutions of Antelope Creek complex daily life: family, occupation, economic realities of the period and a strand of life giving geography, the Canadian River, that traverses the Panhandle, beginning in New Mexico just south of Raton and ending as a tributary to the Arkansas River 760 miles from it's origin to the east.

    Along the Canadian River, from New Mexico through Texas and into Oklahoma, numerous similar sites containing Antelope Creek-type petroglyphs have been excavated. In preparation for the Sanford Dam project back in the mid 1960's which flooded the region to create the Lake Meredith National Recreation Area many symbols carved into the dolomite rock were excavated throughout the area. Several miles upstream near the mouth of McDowell Creek in Big Canyon, another oversized footprint was discovered. Many other footprint, turtle and bison carvings have been found along the Canadian River and throughout the Panhandle Plains area as well. One can safely assume today that they are common symbols that were intended to communicate common values among like minded inhabitants. From a Wikipedia article on petroglyphs, a writer has said that



To quote more specifically,



    The carvings are cut deep into the surface of dolomite rock. Dolomite is a very hard rock, consisting of calcium magnesium carbonate, a chemical composition similar to chalk or even caliche , which is simple calcium carbonate. Dolomite gets it's hardness from a small amount of magnesium introduced into the process during the rock's formation. Dolomite is one of the most common rocks on Earth and is the result of ancient lakes that evaporated, leaving the appropriate chemicals to create it's composition. Pressure exerted on the formation gave it compaction to complete the process. Rocks are interesting in that they come in various hardnesses. Diamonds are harder than quartzite and chert, or flint, which are in turn, harder than dolomite. Other common rocks in the Canadian River area are, appropriately quartzite and flint and in order for one to carve a symbol into the hard surface of dolomite he would need a rock harder than dolomite itself. Thus most rock carvings were probably made with tools crafted from quartzite or flint. A hammer would complete the tool kit for the petroglyph's construction. The only missing ingredient would be the creativity of common values.

    Along with the fact that



which, when one observes the carvings at Alibates they will notice that the surface of the rock is similar in color to the depth of the carving itself.

    Carved into the stones at the gallery are two turtles, a bison, an artificially large footprint and the now almost indiscernible man-like figure with his arms spread above his head. The two turtle carvings, placed next to each other but on separate rocks, set with their heads pointing in a northerly direction. As an observer facing north, the turtle on the left points to about 279 degrees north-northwest while the turtle on the right points about 289 or 290 degrees north-northwest. After sunset as the Big Dipper becomes visible over the northern horizon and begins to move counter-clockwise below the horizon, one wonders if the turtles were purposely placed to generally face the northerly direction, or to face toward the river or perhaps in some relationship to certain astronomical object or event. Both turtle objects are about the size of a large man's hand and are carved about 1/8" deep into the dolomite.

    To the right of the two turtle boulders lies a flat rock about two feet long and about three feet wide with an overly large footprint carved lightly into the rock's surface. Abnormally long, the footprint is about two feet long and over six inches wide. Scattered along the surface of the rock and across the footprint carving are about two dozen pock marks of an unknown origin or purpose. This author has never seen that type of surface marking on dolomite in any other natural environment, leading one to guess what their purpose was. Wes Phillips, curator of the Hutchinson County Historical Museum in nearby Borger, Texas thought that they may have been mixing wells for face paint used by the inhabitants during ceremonial use.     A logical theory of how the footprint became a significant symbol goes something like this: one of the inhabitants saw a human footprint in the mud and took that symbol and began using it as a metaphor for proof of their exclusive existence at this particular location. "I've been here," the foot symbol would say, and with it's extraordinary length, "I'm significant and history will see my civilization as greater than my own individual existence." Their feet got them where they needed to go and back again for centuries.

    Perhaps as a misunderstanding of the historical cultural context, many scholars of the past assumed that since there was an abundance of bison along the vast plains of the Llano Estacado, the Antelope Creek inhabitants existed primarily on bison. However, when one considers that horses had yet to be reintroduced to the western hemisphere (remember that the Antelope Creek civilization were pedestrian hunters) bison would have been difficult to track and stalk and dangerous to hunt. The environmental and climatic conditions of the era were vastly different than today: a climate wetter than the one we know and experience daily, and the abundance of fossil springs gushing from the still naturally full Ogallala Aquifer makes it more likely that the existence of large and long lived turtles may have made them a more likely candidate for a source of protein and at best a relatively common staple for an uncertain diet.

    But, then again, in an article on rock carvings in Saskatchewan, writer Tim Jones stated that

Thus, the turtle symbol could have been a well wisher's gesture toward a successful bison hunt, where the successful harvesting of a single animal may feed a family for several weeks, a single turtle may feed a family only for a day. Perhaps the turtle served a dual purpose.

    In close proximity to the two turtle carvings lies a rock with the carving of a single bison. The placement of the bison near the two turtle symbols in the gallery may be contextual for ritualizing the turtle: as Jones has said: "fertility and longevity." Long live the duration of the bison's abundance and may the hunter be strong so that he may harvest the bison, lest he be stuck eating only the turtle!And the hunter: as indiscernible as he is in modern guise, his earlier rendition created by the ancients places himself in the same context as the hunted animals, a participant in the chase, the hunt to survive. The footprint, somewhat more abstract than his physiological image, could represent his abstract super-existence and the hunter carving tells of a story when hunters, strengthened by fertility and longevity, sought power in a history larger than he himself lived. In an unfortunate appropriation of time and space, the hunters and other inhabitants of the Antelope Creek phase left under somewhat mysterious circumstances sometime after 1400AD. Whether the weather patterns changed and caused a shortage in resources or they were replaced by a more powerful but simpler civilization, no one knows.

    Whatever the reason for their demise, the Antelope Creek complex left complex and uniformly constructed dwellings, artifacts that tell us empirically and definitively stories of their daily lives, and carvings which tell us they had an identity that fit handily into their natural environment. They had power, prestige and created enough symbolic evidence that we know that other tribal and familial groups of the Panhandle Plains had similar ties, values and beliefs, wealth and sophistication.