EEPORT OF THE SECRETARY 67 



started on the remains of a lar<^^e pit-house village. One refuse 

 mound containing 12 burials with accompanying mortuary offer- 

 ings and two pit houses had been investigated at the close of the 

 fiscal year. 



The pit houses were found to be characteristic of that type and 

 quite comparable to those excavated in the Chaco Canyon in 1927, 

 reported in Bulletin 92 of the Bureau of American Ethnology, and 

 to those excavated in eastern Arizona in the summer of 1929, 

 described in Bulletin 100 of the bureau. 



From July 1, 1930, to May 10, 1931, J. N. B. Hewitt, ethnologist, 

 was engaged in routine office work, and from the latter date to the 

 end of the fiscal year he was engaged in field service on the Grant 

 of the Six Nations on the Grand River in Ontario, Canada, and, 

 briefly, on the Tuscarora reservation in western New York State. 



Mr. Hewitt devoted much time and study to rearranging and 

 retyping some of his native Iroquoian texts which critical revisions 

 and additional data had made necessary to facilitate interlinear 

 translations and to render such texts as legible as possible for the 

 printer. 



The texts so treated are the Cayuga version of the founding of the 

 League of the Iroquois as dictated by the late Chief Abram Charles ; 

 the version of the Eulogy of the Founders as dictated by Chief Jacob 

 Hess in Cayuga, and also his versions of the addresses introducing 

 the several chants; also, four of the myths of the Wind and Vege- 

 table Gods which are usually represented by wooden faces and husk 

 faces (which are customarily misnamed masks, although their chief 

 purpose is to represent, not to mask). The Onondaga texts of these 

 myths were in great need of careful revision, for their relator was 

 extremely careless in his use of the persons and the tenses of the 

 verbs, frequently changing from the third to the second person and 

 from past to future time by unconsciously employing the language 

 of the rites peculiar to the faces ; and also the decipherment of a set 

 of i:)ictographs or mnemonic figures, designed and employed by the 

 late Chief Abram Charles, of the Grand River Reservation in 

 Canada, to recall to his mind the official names and their order of 

 the 49 federal chiefs of the Council of the League of the Iroquois, 

 in chanting the Eulogy of the Founders of the League; and also to 

 recall the 15 sections or burdens of the great Requickening Address 

 of the Council of Condolence and Installation ; this paper with illus- 

 trations is nearly ready for the printer; and also a critical study of 

 the matter of the Onondaga and the Cayuga texts, giving the several 

 variant versions of the events attending the birth and childhood and 

 work of Deganawida. He was born of a virgin mother, which indi- 

 cated that underlying them there appeared to be an ideal figure, 

 102992—32 6 



