Beginning about the time of Christ or a little earlier, the eastern part of the plains began to witness the development of a wide variety of cultures that made elongate pottery vessels with conoidal bases, corner-notched projectile points, and that sometimes erected small burial mounds, elements that had their ultimate origin in eastern United States and, indeed, these were presaged in scattered late Archaic sites in the American Midwest. Some of these emerging plains Woodland complexes, including the so-called Kansas City Hopewell, clearly were inspired by Middle Woodland influences in northeastern United States. Still other Woodland elements appear to have diffused onto the plains and were overlaid on a variety of pre-existing Archaic bases. These Woodland complexes extend west to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, up the Missouri River into Montana, north into southern Canada, and south into Oklahoma and Texas. Archaeologists believe that a good case can be made in many instances for a continuum between the indigenous Archaic peoples and Woodland populations, but a dramatic change in hunting took place with the introduction of the bow and arrow, and in cooking by the widespread use of pottery.
Good examples of architecture appear during this time. Oval house patterns, probably resembling small dome-shaped structures covered by hides or bark, like wickiups, probably sheltered a nuclear family, and we may presume small hamlets of such structures typified their settlements. Representative complexes include Besant in the Northern Plains, and the Keith Phase in the Central Plains. Wild plant foods continued to be gathered, as always, but in about AD 250 the Kansas City Hopewell began the limited cultivation of maize, squash, and marshelder. Other groups and later Woodland sites in the Eastern Plains also contain sunflower seeds, though the cultivation of maize and other cultivated crops apparently did not extend into the western High Plains (see Figure 5).
World History
