The Ancestral Wichita people lived in the eastern Great Plains from the Red River in Arkansas north to Nebraska for at least two thousand years.

Early Wichita people were hunters and gatherers who gradually adopted agriculture.

Farming villages are developed about 900 CE on terraces above the Washita and South Canadian Rivers in present-day Oklahoma.

The women of these tenth-century communities cultivate varieties of maize, beans, and squash (known as the Three Sisters), marsh elder (Iva annua), and tobacco, which is important for religious purposes.

The men hunt deer, rabbits, turkey, and, primarily, bison, and catch fish and harvest mussels from the rivers.

These villagers live in rectangular, thatched-roof houses.