Kansas City Hopewell

The Kansas City Hopewell were the farthest west regional variation of the Hopewell tradition of the Middle Woodland period (100 BCE – 700 CE). Sites were located in Kansas and Missouri around the mouth of the Kansas River where it enters the Missouri River. There are 30 recorded Kansas City Hopewell sites.

The sites are made up of distinctive pottery styles and impressive burial mounds containing stone vault tombs. It is however uncertain whether this culture developed locally when people adopted Hopewell traits, or if westward migrating Hopewell people brought it all with them.

The Hopewell Exchange system began in the Ohio and Illinois river valleys about 300 BCE. The culture is referred to more as a system of interaction among a variety of societies than as a single society or culture. Hopewell trading networks were quite extensive, as has been found by the evidence of goods such as obsidian from the Yellowstone area, copper from Lake Superior, and shells from the Gulf Coast in locations distant from their origins.

The Kansas City Hopewell period is divided by archaeologists into three phases based on radiocarbon dates and changes in projectile point styles and ceramic decoration.

The Kansas City Hopewell peoples grew a variety of domesticated plants, including squash and marsh elder. The majority of their diet seems to have come from wild resources such as seeds, nuts, deer, raccoon, and turkey. Their exploitation of the resources of the oak-hickory forest allowed them to establish permanent villages.

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