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Plains Woodland Pathways: Kansas City Hopewell - Ep 15
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In this episode of The Great Plains Archaeology Podcast, we explore the Plains Woodland Period and the vast networks that connected the Great Plains to the Midwest and Southeast. Focusing on the Kansas City Hopewell, we examine the evidence for long-distance exchange, ceremonial traditions, and social ties that linked Plains communities with broader cultural movements. We also discuss Late Woodland feasting events and their role in setting the stage for later interactions with Mississippian cultures. Join us as we uncover how these early connections shaped the cultural landscape of the Plains before the rise of the Mississippian world.
Links and Sources:
- Early Maize (Zea mays) in the North American Central Plains: The Microbotanical Evidence by Adair et al. in American Antiquity 87(2) pp. 333-351 (2022)
- Late Woodland feasting and social networks in the lower Missouri River region by Brad Logan in North American Archaeologist 43(3) pp. 184-229 (2022)
- Modeling Kanas City Hopewell Developments and Regional Social Interactions: A Multisite Ceramic Analysis and New AMS Radiocarbon Ages Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology 44(1) pp. 2-41 (2019)
- The Archaeology of the North American Great Plains by Douglas B. Bamforth (2021)
- Archaeology on the Great Plains Edited by W. Raymond Wood (1998)
- Carlton's KU Anthropology Faculty Bio
Transcripts
- For rough transcripts of this episode, go to: https://www.archpodnet.com/great-plains-archaeology/15
Contact:
- Instagram: @pawnee_archaeologist
- Email: greatplainsarchpodcast@gmail.com
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. You're listening to the Great Plains Archaeology Podcast. Join me as we uncover the rich histories of North America's Great Plains, exploring the latest archaeological discoveries and past cultures that shaped this storied region. Welcome to the podcast.
Carlton Gover on the Woodland Period
00:00:22
Speaker
Welcome episode 15 of the Great Plains Archaeology Podcast. I am your host, Carlton Gover, and I'm thrilled to have you join me on this exciting journey through the rich and fascinating history North America's Great Plains. I'm not feeling great, everybody, so sorry about that. Coming off a little bit of a cold over the weekend, needed to get an episode, but really excited to talk with everybody here about the Woodland Period. And so, we've kind of gone off the rails a little bit these past couple episodes, right? Like we had the Tribute to Lance.
00:00:51
Speaker
Bordeaux to death with taxonomy. And then the last episode we talked about Civilization 7. Not necessarily quite archaeology. So we're kind of jumping back into talking about broad strokes, major cultural periods,
00:01:09
Speaker
within Great Plains archaeology. So the last time we did this, we talked about ah the Archaic period. We were talking about Nebo Hill, Nebo Hill being part of what seems like one of these very early pottery cultures across the southeast and Midwest.
00:01:27
Speaker
And so that's like in the late
Significance of the Woodland Period
00:01:29
Speaker
Archaic. And so now we're going to return start to transition into the Woodland period, which very broadly... Broadly, broadly, broadly. If you read Doug's book, Doug has a whole talk about like when does Woodland start or end.
00:01:43
Speaker
And roughly like 500 BC, give or take, you know, year of Sundays or something like that. But to go as as early as like 700 BC, but what's more most important to know that many of these changes, as discussed in previous episodes, like the life ways...
00:02:04
Speaker
that change on the Great Plains are by and large happening on the eastern periphery, closest the closer you get to the Missouri River, right?
Environmental Impacts on Culture
00:02:15
Speaker
Diving back to those first couple episodes where we discussed the environment of the Great Plains, like the eastern part of the Great Plains, that has an area that is more dense in vegetation and but it's not as cold summers last longer winters are shorter and so that's where you have a lot of vegetation growth right that's also the tall grass prairie and you know
00:02:42
Speaker
People in the western part of the plains, the high plains up until theyre the Rocky Mountains, like they're doing the same stuff they've always been doing since the Paleoiden period. That's where you go to hunt bison, hunt game. That's not to say that those those are separate people in the eastern parts and the western parts. No.
00:02:56
Speaker
Just largely the behaviors that people are doing between these two
Plains Woodland Period Characteristics
00:03:01
Speaker
zones. You hunt in the west, you grow crops in the east. And so the Plains Woodland period is occurring between, let's just say like 500 BC and roughly like 1200 AD.
00:03:16
Speaker
Some people will cut it off at a thousand, but there's still some of these, especially in the central Plains, Plains Woodland lifeways that are still persisting into into the twelve hundred And why is it called woodland? There's not really woods on the plains. And i we touched upon this in the in the taxonomy episode, right?
00:03:36
Speaker
Great Plains archaeologists noticed that Many of the settlement systems and material culture from this time period was already established in in the Southeast and Midwest. right So we adopted that term woodland, and that doesn't always mean they're contiguous. right like The Midwest has a woodland period, then a Mississippian period.
00:04:00
Speaker
In the Great Plains, we have a woodland period that goes into Plains Village. We don't have a Mississippian period out here. So they're not interchangeable. And they do need to, like, probably the names need to be changed. What categorizes Plains Woodland as being different than the archaic period, however...
00:04:18
Speaker
is in the woodland period, we see an
Hopewell Culture and Trade
00:04:21
Speaker
increased use of coltogens. We're seeing more domesticated crops appearing. So maize isn't the big crop yet, but we're seeing squash, beans, goosefoot, a little bit of maize, but we are starting to see the appearance of these coltogens and early changes away from purely hunting and gathering. We're starting to see horticulture or gardening.
00:04:51
Speaker
So we're not full-blown agriculture yet. We're doing small-scale gardens in a settlement pattern where we're talking about like a couple houses in a community. They might also not be contemporaneous, but people are still very heavily reliant on hunting and gathering, though.
00:05:11
Speaker
But we're seeing an increased seditism. And three episodes ago when we talked about Nebo Hill and it being outside the Kansas City area, well, we have some major changes going on across the Midwest and Southeast where we see the origins of the Hopewell culture.
00:05:36
Speaker
Now, Hopewell is really known in Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana, and rightly so. That's where like the major centers are. And the Hopewell culture itself, and we we'll explain how it comes back into the Great Plains, but the Hopewell culture begins around 100 BC, give or take.
00:05:59
Speaker
And these were mound builders. Now, they're not the typical mound building societies that we associate with the Mississippians by any stretch of the imagination. However, some of these sites and earthen structures that created were like hundreds of acres in size.
00:06:13
Speaker
And we're seeing... a heavy increase in trade goods. So we're also talking about like in Ohio, we're seeing obsidian coming in from Wyoming and bison goods coming in from Canada, that there's this fantastic map of, I think it was part of like a Hopewell conference or something that showed at a single mound site, the different goods that were found within this Hopewell mound structure.
00:06:37
Speaker
And it's all over. And if we can look at... Well, how did that happen? If you look at a map and you look at a river map of the United States, the Ohio River dumps into the Mississippi, which also connects to the Missouri, all roughly around the same area-ish.
00:06:55
Speaker
And so it's these, as we've talked about before, rivers become a highway of trade and connection between the Great Plains. Now, why why does this matter to anybody?
00:07:11
Speaker
How does this matter to the Great Plains? Well, in the 1950s, we, as we, like archaeologists, uncovered a Hopewell culture outside of Kansas City, very close to Nebo Hill.
00:07:26
Speaker
And so we're seeing this connection again, this place in in western, like northwestern Missouri, in eastern Kansas, where becoming connected to this larger system. And you know, what defines Kansas City Hopewell? Well, for a long time, it was believed that Kansas City Hopewell represented migrants coming in from Illinois or Ohio. We know that's not true now after Lameria Dare and some others redated a bunch of sites.
Kansas City Hopewell's Unique Traits
00:07:55
Speaker
We're seeing that not only was Kansas City Hopewell a kind continuation of earlier woodland groups, that there are Kansas City Hopewell specific cultural traits. So it's not a migration of folks coming out of Ohio and displacing locals. These are locals, which makes sense, right? If we think about Nebo Hill and already there being a precedent in the late archaic of connection through the river systems, it's not, you know, that those memories of connection and connectivity or relationships of trade don't just disappear.
00:08:31
Speaker
And so,
00:08:34
Speaker
it's not out of realm that some of these populations continued. And so, and you know, here in Kansas, though, I will say in the mid, in, in the great plains, Kansas city hope. Well, especially in Kansas and Missouri has has become an all encompassing term for anything belonging to the middle woodland period.
00:08:56
Speaker
Now, middle woodland is, is roughly from like, uh, 1 BC to 500 AD, that's just not true. So like one thing that I've talked about with Mary, because Mary still comes to the office here at the University of Kansas, is that anything that has dated to that period just gets labeled Kansas City Hopewell. When no one really has done a systematic study of of what Kansas City Hopewell is, but for this Middle Woodland period, this Kansas City Hopewell period,
00:09:23
Speaker
Where there used to be mounts outside of Kansas City, they're gone now because of Kansas City, that there needs to be some systematic analysis to really define, hey, we can tell looking at some of the pottery that the pottery is distinct.
00:09:38
Speaker
But what else makes Kansas hope City Hopewell distinctive from the other Hopewell groups? Because if you look at a map of Hopewell, right? You can see you have the Ohio Hopewell out in Ohio. you have the Crab Orchard out in Illinois.
00:09:54
Speaker
South of us in Oklahoma is the Questus Cooper. have a central Missouri. you have Havana up the Mississippi. And then you have Marksville Hopewell, which is the like Louisiana Mississippi Delta.
00:10:06
Speaker
So, These cultures are being largely connected, and I believe it's the Arkansas River that connects the Cuesta Cooper to the rest of the Mississippi. These are all connected through the riverine systems.
00:10:21
Speaker
And there's a number of sites here in Kansas, and it's just the pottery is very similar. We're seeing the mound structures, and this is happening and in in this middle pier. And to really get this point across, right, as previously stated, Kansas City Hopewell, originally believed to represent migrants, is now you know understood to be local woodland groups who are doing something new, very similar to the neighbors down the road, and could you know arguably be you know that next step, not necessarily next step, but like it's not unsurprising considering we have the Nebo Hill stuff, um which was you know earliest pottery around the same area, really close, right? Within 20 miles of the Nebo Hill site to Kansas City Hopewell, they're still incredibly close.
Social Networks and Feasting Events
00:11:12
Speaker
Separated in time, yes, but kind of re-hitting on those connections. And the pottery is, if you Google the pottery from Kansas City Hopewell, especially some of this Markwell height types from Louisiana, like it's intricate. it it is This is intricate pottery. There's no doubt that there's some sort of connectivity going on.
00:11:33
Speaker
um but has a mix of different tempers, temper being the additives to clay for firing so that it doesn't break, that we have some really... incredible examples of continental trade in interaction that are occurring right at the turn of the millennium, right? So we're seeing these spheres of influence being built east of the Rockies. And that might be an episode later about, you know, like cultural othering and related groups and we'll get to that. But we'll be right back after this break. We'll be right back with episode 15, looking at the Woodland period here in the Great Plains.
00:12:13
Speaker
And we're back. So in a later episode, we'll talk like probably more dedicated, like a whole episode or two on the Kansas City Hopewell specific sites. But, you know, the Hopewell culture, there are like some of the mounds were burial mounds. There have been some ridiculous theories as to, you know, what what ended the Hopewell culture.
00:12:33
Speaker
Some folks but believe it was a friggin comet. And that's been widely debunked. I believe that paper was we were retracted from That paper that was the journal was published in.
00:12:46
Speaker
And we're just right around 500 C.E. The woodland culture just this this not woodland. Sorry, this hopo culture across the Midwest and, you know, the eastern periphery of the Great Plains and the lower miss ah Missouri River Valley region just just stops. And so mound building stops.
00:13:04
Speaker
And we're not entirely sure what happened. People could have just got tired of it. But then we go into it in the Great Plains. We go into to this late woodland period. And like mound building ceases. You know, later if you look at, especially Cahokia, right, which starts picking up again around, i think it's heights 1100 1200, starts picking up around that Many of these same regions of the east down the stream from the Missouri River.
00:13:28
Speaker
Dew Mountain cultures, again, we get the Mississippians. and And maybe like a good analogy for what we're seeing is like if we look at ancient Greek city-states, we see Crete being this epicenter early on of like a chiefdom culture complexity.
00:13:44
Speaker
And then later... Greece proper comes to to prominence and we can maybe make some of those same analogies where like Hopewell is the equivalent of that ancient Crete being that forerunner to later cultures that appears. so We see vestiges of relationships through you know Nebo Hill and maybe some of those early ceramic cultures in the late Archaic begin to appear.
00:14:06
Speaker
But the Great Plains, we don't get mound building. But there's a fun paper that I made my my students read by Brad Logan back in 2022, not that but that long ago.
00:14:19
Speaker
But in the late woodland period, around where Kansas City Hopeville used to be dominant, we still see evidence of interactions. And these are more localized.
00:14:30
Speaker
So there's this really fun paper that he had that was on him feasting and social networks in the lower Missouri River region. And at these Quixote sites outside of, you know, northeast Kansas, northwest Missouri, through lipid analysis, we're looking at the fat residue of ceramics and other tools.
00:14:49
Speaker
Evidence of feasting events. And that caught my eye. thinking about it because no one's really looked at feasting features here if you in this part of, of the country.
00:15:02
Speaker
Feasting is such a integral part to many complex sips, right? Bringing people together and there's many different reasons, right? Like we can think about it today when you bring all your friends to dinner for like a social event, celebration, holidays, our big feasting events, people used to have done that through time from all the same different, you know, for many different reasons.
00:15:23
Speaker
And so, kind of hitting a point that I've talked about before where there's just not that many archaeologists interested at the academic level of Great Plains archaeology. Everyone wants to work in the Southwest, everyone wants to work on Mississippian, or more importantly, people that do work on the Great Plains are mostly doing Paleo-Indian stuff.
00:15:44
Speaker
They're not working on more the complex sieve that's more indicative of Plains Village or Kansas City Hopewell. um but If you go through the literature on these places, especially in Kansas, right, which has been such a strong, has had such a strong focus on local Kansas archaeology, like it's Mary and Bob and Bob Horde, sorry, Mary Adair, Bob Horde, Lauren Riverbush and Brad Logan, you know, basically University of Kansas, Kansas State, and the Kansas State archaeologist working on these sites. And so getting back on topic, right?
00:16:21
Speaker
I don't know too super much about Kansas City Hopewell, just broad strokes. But the fact that in the same area after Kansas City Hopewell has you know ceased to exist, you know the people didn't disappear.
00:16:32
Speaker
People stopped practicing culture like Kansas City Hopewell, if that makes sense. like They stopped building mountains. and Probably people voted with their feet, meaning they just walked away.
Introduction of Maize
00:16:41
Speaker
But in the same area to see feasting events, which are much more common,
00:16:46
Speaker
and the archaeological record being associated with socially complex or socially stratified communities, you know, maybe even though the mounds stopped being built, the pottery in that way stopped being made, that some of these cultural practices of feasting and community building still persisted, you know, 500, you know, 200, 300, 400, 500 years later, right? Because feasting isn't just like, all right, especially back in these days, it wasn't like you could just order a bunch of Subs from Jimmy John's. Like there was preparation involved.
00:17:21
Speaker
You couldn't just text anybody. You had to send a runner out to go let people know where the feast is. Like there's a lot of planning that goes on to...
00:17:34
Speaker
coordinating an event such as feasting. And I wanted to bring it up because like potentially we could see echoes of this Hopo culture in this area through this feasting event. And I'll put a link down below.
00:17:51
Speaker
To this paper that you guys can read to look at the evidence that they present, the lipid analysis, but also some of the roasting pit features that they found. But, you know, one thing to ask is, like, how do we know this was for feasting?
00:18:04
Speaker
And these roasting pits aren't necessarily for, like, what we see up or aren't similar to what we see up in head smashed in, right? I think we talked about head smashed in, right, on this podcast?
00:18:16
Speaker
Possibly not. But, you know, head smashed in, there's plenty of roasting features where they're processing inordinate amounts of bison to get bison grease for pemmican.
00:18:27
Speaker
So maybe these, you know, it could be also said like, hey, Brad, possibly. But Brad's a really smart guy. And like also in his paper, they did talk about head smashed in and this this idea.
00:18:39
Speaker
Anywho, so that's just kind what I brought up about what's going on with woodland and some... you know After Kansas City Hopewell, right? Because the mound structures were beautiful. The pottery is beautiful for everyone. to just going to stop doing that.
00:18:52
Speaker
What could have happened? Warfare could have been hypothesized. But even afterwards, you know maybe some of those cultural behaviors, you know they didn't just cease with Kansas City Hopewell declining.
00:19:04
Speaker
right Traditions still persist. But woodland is also, i want to like round out this, you know, today's talk, we're just kind of talking about, you know, maize, you know, it's, it's around this point we're getting, so're we're seeing corn come into the great plains, right?
00:19:21
Speaker
Which today, like the Nebraska, Kansas, Illinois, these areas are so synonymous with with corn. Remember corn comes from maize, maize comes from Teosinte, maize and Teosinte are both from
Technological Changes: Bow and Arrow
00:19:31
Speaker
Mexico. You know, they are desert crops, desert grasses, and,
00:19:36
Speaker
And Mary Adair here at KU, I talk about a bunch. and It's because like, well, one, Mary studies like pollen and micro botanical remains. And so she's able to, to like identify some of these but remains and that sites to be able to understand like the phytoliths, mage starches um that are present and to identify the presence of these, of these sites.
00:20:00
Speaker
And, It's within the the Woodland period that we begin to see maize. And it's it like I said, next episode, where I believe we're going to be talking more about the Plains Village period, which is something i know much more about, where maize becomes dominant. Here we see the presence of maize, but it hasn't really taken off quite yet.
00:20:23
Speaker
And so, so yeah, believe, I think Mary said that beer might have been... May's beer could have been present at some point.
00:20:35
Speaker
Anywho, this is cold brain taking over. i got like really excited to talk about Kansas City Hopewell and talk about some of these feasting events. But let me summarize kind of what's happening over on the Plains Woodland.
00:20:51
Speaker
So in earlier episodes, looking at the archaic and paleo-indian, we're talking about a time span of like a thousand years, over the thousands of years. Yeah. this woodland period in the planes, we're talking about like a 1700 year time span. It's like much shorter than what we've talked about before. And a lot of things were happening fast.
00:21:10
Speaker
We glossed over early woodland because nothing too special is happening, but like Kansas city hopo mound building, you know, people purposely creating monumental structures,
00:21:23
Speaker
That's big. People ah were seeing evidence of feasting. That's big. The introduction of maize, that's big. All on the tops of Nebo Hill, which is not too crazy, but as the oldest pottery in the Great Plains, right next to Kansas City, we know it's connected.
00:21:40
Speaker
We're seeing these connections in the Great Plains being reinforced elsewhere in the United States. In particular, the Southeast and Midwest.
00:21:52
Speaker
It's also during this time we start to see, hypothesize when the bow and arrow becomes an adoptive technology, right? People didn't come here from elsewhere outside of North America with bows and arrows that came here adlatles and spears.
00:22:10
Speaker
It's around this Middle Woodland period or the Woodland period in general, we believe the bow and arrow was introduced to the Great Plains. Now we're also seeing this time period that corn and maize is being introduced.
Transition to Plains Village Period
00:22:22
Speaker
Hasn't taken off yet, but what we're doing is setting the stage right because Hopo was pervasive across the broader Mississippi River drainage system. Ends around 500.
00:22:34
Speaker
We're going to see Cahokia start taking off. like really 10,000, 11,000 AD, what's up the Missouri River from Cahokian, that's the Great Plains, where we have established through Kansas City Hope, where we've established through Nebo Hill, these connections, right? So, like, this is what I always try to stretch stress to my students, like, keep note of what about you know what we read about in earlier segments, right?
00:23:00
Speaker
Because these things are connected. And so in the next episode of the Great Plains Archaeology Podcast, we're going to look into the Plains Village period more succinctly.
Episode Conclusion and Credits
00:23:11
Speaker
We're going to start talking about...
00:23:13
Speaker
the early plains village period central plains tradition oneota talk about some really cool things that are happening some big changes that we're starting to see as well as more types of archaeological evidence that we can see through more settled systems that we can infer more human behaviors from right like it's really hard to talk about human behavior and culture and really do like the anthropology in archaeology and hunting gathering systems we're starting to get to a point now where like we can really look at archaeological archaeological archaeology and ah some really cool things that are happening on Great Plains with that I will see you guys all next time this has been Dr. Carlton Schillchief-Cover I don't know how to end this I'm see y'all two weeks take it easy peace
00:24:02
Speaker
Thank you for listening to the Great Plains Archaeology Podcast. You can follow me on Instagram at Pawnee underscore archaeologist. And you can also email me at greatplainsarchpodcast at gmail.com. And remember, anybody can love the mountains, but it takes a soul to love the prairie.
00:24:20
Speaker
American author, Willa Cather.
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Speaker
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Speaker
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