ABORIGINAL POTTERY. 



577 



Ohio River at Shawneetown to the Mississippi, and at some places at- 

 tains a height of about VOO feet, being the highest land in Illinois or 

 in either of the adjoining States of Missouri, Kentucky, and Indiana. 

 Immediately south of the salt-springs is a spur of the main hill, its 

 northern terminus being precipitous bluffs of metamorphic sandstone, 

 which Prof. Worthen, the State Geologist of Illinois, who once visited 

 the location with me, classed with the Chester group. Above this 

 bluff, where the spur rises at an angle of about 30, it has been 

 terraced, and the terraces as well as the crown of the spur have 

 been used as a cemetery: portions of the terraces are still perfect ; all 

 the burials appear to have been made in rude stone cists, that vary in 

 size from eighteen inches by three feet, to two feet by four feet, and 

 from eighteen inches to two feet deep. They are made of thin-bedded 

 sandstone slabs, generally roughly shaped, but some of them have 

 been edged and squared with considerable care, particularly the cov- 

 ering-slabs. The slope below the terraces was thickly strewed with 

 these slabs, washed out as the terraces have worn away, and which 

 have since been carried off for door-steps and hearthstones. 



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Fig. 2. 



I have opened many of these cists; they nearly all contain frag- 

 ments of human bones far gone in decay, but I have never succeeded 

 in securing a perfect skull; even the clay vessels that were interred 

 with the dead have disintegrated, the portions remaining being almost 

 as soft and fragile as the bones. 



Some of the cists that I explored were paved with valves of fresh- 

 water shells, but most generally with the fi-agments of the great salt- 

 pans, which, in every case, are so far gone in decay as to have lost the 

 outside markings. This seems conclusively to couple the tenants of 

 these ancient graves with the makers and the users of the salt-pans. 



The great number of graves and the quantity of slabs that have 

 been washed out prove either a dense population or a long occu- 

 pancy, or both. 



On the crown of the main hill above the cemeterv are ranires of 

 circular depressions, from one to three feet deep, and from fifteen to 

 twenty-five feet in diameter ; they cover a large area, on two sides of 

 which there is evidence of earthwoi-ks. 

 VOL. XI. 37 



