View gallery associated with our Kansas City Hopewell collections.

Kansas City Hopewell vessel with lip, neck and body decorations

From approximately 500BC to AD 1000, the central Plains was home to ceramic making groups who were becoming increasingly sedentary and were progressively adopting agriculture.  The term Woodland is used to collectively define these groups, a term borrowed from the Eastern Woodlands to reflect similarities in ceramic styles and lithic technologies.  On the central Plains however, Woodland cultures likely evolved from earlier Archaic populations whose adaptations increased in complexity from communication and sharing of concepts with populations along the major waterways as well as from Eastern contacts.  Variability in ceramic styles, stone tool production, burial patterns, trade networks, subsistence choices, and spatial and temporal existence help identify the different Woodland cultures that existed during these 1500 years.

Kansas City Hopewell ceramic designs

The best-known Woodland culture in the central Plains is the Kansas City Hopewell, from which most data come from sites in the vicinity of present day Kansas City. Radiocarbon dates from sites such as Young (23PL4), Aker (23PL43), Desiter (23PL2), Trowbridge (14WY1), Quarry Creek (14LV401) and Kelley (14DP10) suggest a fairly intense occupation from ca.AD 1 to 400, with western occupations lasting serveral more centuries. Major settlements in various ecological settings focused on resources associated with the Missouri or Kansas Rivers, major tributaries, and intermittent backwater niches.

The Kansas City Hopewell culture is known for its distinctive pottery, diagnostic projectile point styles, elaborate burial practices, participation in long-distance trade for exotic materials, and successful adaptation to the oak-hickory forest/eastern prairies ecotone.  The conical shaped ceramics often exhibit decorated rims (with cross hatched lines, rows of punctates or embossing, and crenulated marks across the lip) and bodies with rocker stamped lines. The most common projectile point styles are broad or narrow-bladed corner-notched dart points.

Middle Woodland projectile points

By the latter part of the Kansas City Hopewell, smaller corner notched styles emerged and are believed to have signaled the adoption of the bow and arrow. Local Permian and Pennsylvanian  cherts were commonly selected for the manufacture of stone tools, although exotic materials such as obsidian from Wyoming, copper from the Great Lakes, and conch shells from the Gulf coast were traded in and made into items presumably associated with high-status individuals. Slab lined burial cists or chambers were constructed for single interments, usually men, also suggesting some form of social ranking.  Given the sizes of the habitation sites and the duration of the complex, some have suggested that the Hopewell experienced huge population expansions and must have relied on agriculture for a primary food source. 

Years of research in the Kansas City area, as well as Hopewell in Illinois and Ohio, have convincingly demonstrated that agricultural foods consisted of indigenous weedy annuals (marshelder, sunflower, goosefoot) and introduced domesticated squash, with very small amount of maize recovered. Although important in the diet, the agricultural crops are often sparsely represented in the subsistence assemblage, suggesting that they did not dominate the economy.  Instead, the populations relied on a variety of nuts, fruits, weedy annuals (both starchy and oily seeds), and hunted deer, smaller game, fish, and migratory waterfowl.

Domesticated squash seeds

Between 1967 and 2002, University of Kansas field crews and summer fieldschools excavated several Kansas City Hopewell habitation sites. Today, most of the large sites are destroyed by urban expansion, with existing collections providing a base for on-going research.  Recent surveys along river valleys in eastern Kansas have also provided excellent evidence for the presence of Kansas City Hopewell well west of their primary zone, suggesting that we may not have a full understanding of the spatial (or temporal) distribution of this culture or its influence on other groups residing in the central Plains during this time.

Around A.D. 600, evidence of another Woodland oriented adaptation is recognized throughout the central Plains.  While these cultures must have been in contact with the Kansas City Hopewell, the dynamics of any interaction remains unclear. These cultures are collectively referred to as Plains Woodland and are best described as semi-sedentary groups (probably nuclear families or kin groups) who utilized both dart and arrow points, manufactured mainly undecorated cord-roughened ceramics, hunted and fished within short distances from their habitations, gathered a wide variety of wild plants and nuts, and incorporated several new cultigens into their diet.  In particular, the quantity of maize from Plains Woodland increases significantly, with a corresponding increase in grinding stones and cache pits.  Subsistence choices, along with attendant changes in settlement patterns, social organization, and political structure made during the Plains Woodland period laid the foundation for what many archaeologists refer to as the “agricultural explosion” identified by following adaptations.

Stone platform pipe, Kansas City Hopewell