NO. 6 MISSOURI VALLEY DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM WEDEL 5 



representing the earliest pottery-makers in the region, are the some- 

 what varied remains designated as Woodland. The very limited ex- 

 cavations to date leave the nature of this occupancy all but unknown, 

 though it seems likely that the settlements were mostly small and 

 rather short-lived, with subsistence based at least as much on hunting 

 as on agriculture. To the same general period, apparently, may be 

 attributed the Hopewellian village sites and burial mounds of north- 

 western Missouri and northeastern Kansas. 



Later came the more sedentary prehistoric village-dwellers. In the 

 Nebraska-Kansas region these include the Upper Republican and Ne- 

 braska Culture remains — well-defined horizons whose exact counter- 

 parts on the upper Missouri are still to be fully worked out. These 

 groups, in addition to hunting and fishing, practiced a fairly intensive 

 corn and bean horticulture ; villages were not fortified ; and in the 

 ruins of their earth-covered pithouses are to be found storage pits, 

 agricultural tools, pottery, and a wide variety of bone, stone, horn, 

 and shell artifacts, but no objects of white man's manufacture. They 

 are thought to have occupied the region during approximately the 

 thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries ; probably some of the 

 later communities on the east were in direct contact with Middle Mis- 

 sissippi groups along the lower Missouri. It is the remains from this 

 period that are found in such relative profusion on most of the arable 

 stream valleys east of the looth meridian, and less commonly 200 

 miles or more yet farther to the west. From the character and abun- 

 dance of their village sites, we surmise that they were moderately 

 populous groups, that they dwelt in comparative peacefulness over a 

 long period of time, that they had partially solved the problem of liv- 

 ing together harmoniously in settled communities, and that they had 

 acquired a somewhat greater degree of control over their local en- 

 vironment than their hunting predecessors possessed. It appears likely, 

 at the same time, that adverse climatic conditions, particularly droughts, 

 may have seriously affected the welfare of some of these peoples — in 

 fact, that to some extent the story of successive occupancies of the 

 region may reflect the vagaries of the environment. 



Whatever the cause or causes, by the time the first white explorers 

 reached the Missouri River watershed and contacted its native peoples 

 in the mid-sixteenth century, the numerous small, widely scattered 

 earthlodge villages in the western plains had been abandoned. Instead, 

 corn-growing Indians dwelt in large towns, some of them strongly 

 fortified (pi. 2, fig. i), much farther to the east. To this general 

 period, dating from approximately 1500 to 1700, belong a series of 

 large Wichita (?) sites in central Kansas, the protohistoric Pawnee 



