The Ancestral Wichita people lived in the eastern Great Plains from the Red River in Arkansas north to Nebraska for at least 2,000 years. Early Wichita people were hunters and gatherers who gradually adopted agriculture. Farming villages were developed about 900 CE on terraces above the Washita and South Canadian Rivers in present-day Oklahoma. The women of these 10th-century communities cultivated varieties of maize, beans, and squash (known as the Three Sisters), marsh elder ("Iva annua"), and tobacco, which was important for religious purposes. The men hunted deer, rabbits, turkey, and, primarily, bison, and caught fish and harvested mussels from the rivers. These villagers lived in rectangular, thatched-roof houses.