We investigate the reflected field for few-cycle ultra-short laser pulses propagating through resonant media embedded within wavelength-scale structures. Full-wave Maxwell–Bloch equations are solved numerically by using the finite-difference time-domain method. The results show that the spectral feature of the reflected spectrum is determined by the Bragg reflection condition, and that the periodic structure of a dense atomic system can be regarded as a one-dimensional photonic crystal and even as a highly reflective multilayer film. Our study explains the suppression of the frequency shifts in the reflected spectrum based on the Bragg reflection theory and provides a method to control the frequency and frequency intervals of the spectral spikes in the reflected spectrum.