144 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 92 



At Plan Grande erect stones like foundation walls suggest rather 

 pretentious buildings, but elsewhere we have no evidence as to houses. 

 The earth and stone mounds at this place suggest ceremonial struc- 

 tures, whereas the low earth mounds at the " Eighty Acre " site are 

 refuse heaps containing scattered burials. Similar mounds are re- 

 ported from Utila and Bonacca but were not encountered by Bird or 

 by our party. Caves such as that on Brandon Hill and number i on 

 Helena indicate only transitory occupation, but the rock shelter at 

 Jonesville Bight was evidently an offertory. This seeming paucity of 

 habitation sites on the Bay Islands is striking. Whether this is a 

 definite indication that the Bay Islands should be regarded as funda- 

 mentally a religious center, like Cozumel or the Island of Sacrificios, 

 can only be demonstrated by more thorough investigation accompanied 

 Ijy adequate spade work. 



Nor is the exact nature of the hilltop shrines or offertories al- 

 together clear. The only undisturbed place of this sort encountered — 

 the Dixon site — contained indubitable, carefully guarded offerings, 

 but showed no trace of human burial, cremation, or deposition of 

 partly cremated remains in jars. The other hilltop sites of like nature 

 containing similar material, such as the Jonesville Bight, Indian Hill, 

 and Marble Hill offertories, all contained scattered, fragmentary 

 human remains, but all these had been too badly disturbed to deter- 

 mine their original nature. The best explanation seems to be that 

 these sites were fundamentally shrines where devotees deposited offer- 

 ings, ranging from the elaborate votive cache at the Dixon site, to 

 ordinary utensils, model vessels, and handfuls of potsherds. In addi- 

 tion, to judge from the urnlike vessels at certain of these sites, in 

 conjunction with small fragments of human bone, these offertories 

 also served as the final resting place for disarticulated or partially 

 cremated remains of certain priests or nobles. Whether these re- 

 mains were placed in urns or special vessels must be determined by 

 future discoveries. At present definite evidence suggesting cremation 

 on the Bay Islands is confined to the few slightly charred human 

 bones which Bird found in burial urn 2 at Black Rock Basin on Utila. 

 Thanks to Bird's painstaking excavations on that island, the nature 

 of certain urn and separate skull burials is clear. In the light of 

 adjacent regions one would be inclined to suspect that these burials 

 in old middens served for commoners, whereas priests and persons 

 of distinction may have been disarticulated or cremated and certain 

 portions of their remains placed in the offertories. The possibility of 

 class distinctions in regard to the different ceramic and artifact types 



