CONANT ARCHAEOLOGY OF MISSOURI. 361 



hard as the bricks now in use. At the depth of about two feet, 

 at the bottom of all which were examined, what seemed to have 

 been a fire-place was disclosed. The earth was also burned, so 

 as to present the color and hardness of the fragments of brick, to 

 the depth of several inches. Along with the broken pottery were 

 found, quite often, fragments of sandstone of various sizes, the 

 larger pieces with concave surfaces, and all showing that they 

 had been used for polishing or sharpening purposes, especially 

 the smaller pieces, which are covered with small grooves one- 

 eighth of an inch deep across the whole length and width, and 

 at various angles with each other, as though they had long 

 been used for sharpening some small metallic instrument or gra- 

 ver's tool. 



One other significant characteristic of these works remains to 

 be noted. All along the shore of the bayou, in front of the en- 

 closed works, small tongues of land have been carried into the 

 water, of varying length and width, averaging perhaps thirty feet 

 in length by ten to fifteen feet in width, and about the same 

 distance apart, resembling, upon a small scale, the wharves of a 

 sea-port town. The cypress trees grow very thickly in all the lit- 

 tle bays thus formed, and the irregular, yet methodical, outline of 

 the forest, winding in and out, close to the shore of these tongues 

 of land, is so marked as to compel the conviction that they are of 

 artificial origin : and further, that, when these works were inhab- 

 ited, what is now a cypress swamp was then the channel of a 

 river. And the idea is no novel or original one, that anciently 

 the Mississippi poured its flood through this long bayou and 

 formed the terraces upon which these works are found. 



One mile south of this point, and about three hundred feet from 

 the margin of the swamp, is a peculiar work which is worthy of 

 notice. It may be described as an oval or egg-shaped excavation, 

 one hundred and fifty feet long and in its largest diameter seventy- 

 five feet wide and about six feet deep. It is sui rounded by an 

 embankment about eight feet high around its northern curve : on 

 the southern end the wall is not over five feet high, in which is 

 a narrow opening, and extending from it is a curved, elevated 

 way to the swamp, into which the earth taken from the excavation 

 seems to have been deposited, until a circular mound or wharf 

 was raised about twenty feet in diameter and five feet high in the 



