150 BULLETIN 183, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



"One of the men who dug out the burials in the north mound picked 

 out a hard-burned area that he described as resembling a Dutch oven. 

 I found two small fragments about 2 inches thick. . . . They appear 

 to be mostly ashes but mixed with what must have been the top 1 inch 

 is charred vegetation and impressions of either coarse grass heads or 

 small ears of corn. The bottom inch is ash merging with the loess of the 

 mound structure. This upper layer has pitted impressions, slightly 

 channeled (1 inch broad in one and % inch in another) which are 

 coated with a paper-thin layer of a gray, buff, and ivory-colored sub- 

 stance. This 'Dutch oven' could have been a cremation basin wherein 

 the fire died out and left a burial and its wrappings partly burned. . . ." 



Aside from the specimens mentioned, several grit- and cell-tempered 

 sherds were found in the mound; also broken hammerstones, crude 

 flint knives, hematite, pumice, and sandstone fragments. 



The pottery from the south mound (pi. 42) differs in few details 

 from that at the Steed-Kisker site, and in my opinion is more closely 

 related to that than to any other ceramic complex yet reported from 

 this portion of the Missouri Valley. Whether that from the north 

 mound has similar affinities I am not prepared to say. The chipped 

 flint from the south mound, at least so far as large-stemmed arrow- 

 points are concerned, is closer to the Woodland type or to that at 

 Kenner's than to any points from known local village complexes 

 characterized by shell-tempered pottery of the type found in the 

 Avondale mounds. Perhaps they represent an earlier period, but 

 their association with burials in at least one instance hardy supports 

 the view that they were accidental inclusions in the mound. 



The Problem of the Stone-Chambered Burial Mou7ids 



One of the most in.teresting and characteristic features of arche- 

 ology in the Kansas City area is the stone-walled earth-covered burial 

 enclosure. Usage has given a certain fixity to the term "vault," though 

 none of the mounds yet described from the region is, in the true sense, 

 a vault. Their usual nature is pretty well known,^^ but the identity 

 of their builders, the time when they were erected, and their exact 

 position in the local archeological picture are problems that up to the 

 present have baffled all attempts at satisfactory solution. Whether the 

 mystery surrounding them can ever be wholly dispelled is not at all 

 certain, for much of the evidence from the earlier excavations has never 

 been set forth in definite fashion. Moreover, those in Platte and 



" Shetrone, 1930, p. 351, says that "the Missouri River, traversing the state a little north 

 of center, marks the line of the most interesting and best known culture of the Lower 

 Mississippi area, that of the so-called 'stone-vault' burials." Perhaps "cult" would have 

 been a happier designation; a perusal of the literature wilt show that these structures, far 

 from comprising a "culture," represent at most but one phase — the mortuary complex — of an 

 archeological manifestation, or manifestations, whose main features otherwise are seen as 

 yet only dimly. 



