Prehistory of Kansas is not what you thought

Book explores early hunters, gatherers and farmers in area

If pressed, most Kansans would guess the Kansa Indians were the state’s first farmers and corn was their first crop.

And they’d be wrong.

“There were people farming here a thousand years before the Kansa got here,” said Robert Hoard, state archaeologist at the Kansas State Historical Society. “Corn didn’t really kick in as a crop until about 1000 A.D.”

The first known crops, he said, were sunflowers and weeds, namely lamb’s quarters, goose foot and pig weed.

Agriculture got its first boost from pottery.

“Imagine trying to cook seeds without a pot,” Hoard said. “You could do it with a skin bag, water and hot stones, but it would be a lot easier to just put a pot in the fire and cook them into a gruel.”

Hoard co-edited and wrote the introduction to “Kansas Archaeology,” a newly released collection of essays on the state’s prehistoric history.

It’s long overdue.

“The last collection like this – ‘An Introduction to Kansas Archaeology’ – came out in 1959,” Hoard said. “It’s become fairly dated.”

Jack Hoffman, associate professor of anthropology at KU, displays three paleoindian spear points found in western Kansas at bison kill sites. Hoffman contributed to a new book on Kansas archeology.

Published by University Press of Kansas, “Kansas Archaeology” is designed to give amateur archaeologists access to information and findings that have been tucked away in technical reports rarely shared with the public.

“Our hope is that the avocational archaeologists will come to use this book as a reference, and that will become a text for college students,” Hoard said. “The professionals are already using it.”

He also hoped the book spurs more arrowhead and stone-tool collectors to share information about their finds. Some do already.

“I understand the appeal of finding stone tools or arrow points and taking them home. But what do we learn from that?” Hoard asked. “The more information we have, the more we can start slowly piecing this picture together.”

Jack Hoffman, an associate professor of anthropology at Kansas University, co-wrote “The Paleoarchaic of Kansas,” an essay that sorts through what’s known – or thought to be known – about the region’s earliest hunters and gatherers.

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“A lot of what we think we know, we don’t really know,” Hoffman said. “We’re reasonably sure there were people here around 12,000 years ago – how they got here, we’re not sure.”

They may have come from the north, the west or the Gulf Coast. “There are reasonably good models for all of these,” Hoffman said.

“Kansas Archaeology” includes an essay on the Kansa Indians, the state’s namesake.

“They were here in the 1770s,” Hoard said. By the early 1800s, they had left the region.

The Kansa, he said, are a small part of the giant puzzle that is archaeology.

“We are trying to discover how people lived before modern technology – before electricity, vehicles, durable fabrics, transportation, agriculture. How did they live?” Hoard said.

“It turns out they lived very differently.”