EXCAVATIONS IN PLATTE COUNTY, MISSOURI 



By WALDO R. WEDEL 



Assistant Curator, Division of Archeology, U. S. National Museum 



Scattered along the timbered bluffs of the Missouri River from its 

 mouth to a point near St. Joseph, Mo., are groups of small mounds in 

 which excavation has revealed stone enclosures containing burials. 

 Their age, origin, and tribal identity have long resisted interpretation, 

 though from the uniformity of construction it has been thought by 

 some that they were left by a single people moving up or down the 

 valley. Below the mouth of the Osage River, such pottery and other 

 materials as have been found in the chambers suggest affinities with 

 remains usually termed "Woodland" in the eastern United States. 

 Farther west there is less internal evidence, so that assignment of 

 those in the Kansas City region to a given archeological horizon has 

 been well-nigh impossible. During the summer of 1937, however, 

 my investigations in southern Platte County had disclosed village 

 sites with artifacts evidently related to the Hopewellian complex of 

 the upper Mississippi drainage ; concurrently amateurs nearby re- 

 ported the finding of similar pottery in a stone enclosure. With 

 renewed hopes that some of the mystery still surrounding these struc- 

 tures might finally be dispelled, I resumed excavations in May along 

 the north bank of the Missouri between Parkville and Farley. 



Nine enclosures were examined ; all had been dug into previously 

 and two were so hopelessly plundered as to give no reliable informa- 

 tion. From the others it was established that the chambers vary from 

 6 to about 9 feet across, square to oval in outline, and range from 2 

 to nearly 4 feet deep. They consist of a carefully laid up mortarless 

 wall of horizontal slabs, against which other large flat rocks were 

 leaned. The area thus covered was about 15 feet in diameter. Some- 

 where in the south half the wall is ordinarily broken by a narrow 

 entrance passage. It is not certain whether the chamber was roofed, 

 but if not it is difficult to understand the reason for a passage. Two 

 mounds yielded the dismembered skeletons of perhaps a dozen indi- 

 viduals, apparently of a medium-statured long-headed people. Al- 

 though less than half the bones were actually burned or cremated, fire 

 evidently played an important though undetermined role in the mortu- 

 ary complex. Artifacts were very rare and inconclusive, but it was 

 noted that shell-tempered smooth and incised pottery occurred in por- 



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