Frontier Life: Late Prehistoric Adaptations of the Kansas City Locality

Abstract

Late Prehistoric (AD 900–1500) adaptations along the lower Missouri River in the Kansas City locality include two distinct contemporaneous archaeological cultures, Steed-Kisker and Pomona. Both are reviewed with emphasis on interaction, change, and continuity. Evidence from other sites in northeastern Kansas, a prairie-woodland ecotone, points to interaction where their culture core areas overlapped, a locality that was a frontier throughout much of prehistory between cultures of the eastern woodlands and the Great Plains. Recent investigation of house remains at the Scott and Caenen sites, representing the Steed-Kisker and Pomona cultures respectively, provides significant insight concerning relations or lack thereof. About 130 years apart in time of occupation, they are only 350 m distant in Stranger Creek valley, the last major tributary of the Kansas River before its confluence with the Missouri River. Both illustrate the contrasting nature of these adaptations, specifically change from a Woodland adaptation represented by Steed-Kisker and continuity with respect to it represented by Pomona, which persisted longer. The possibility of assimilation of both cultures with the Oneota tradition during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is discussed.