ARCHEOLOGICAL INVESTIGATIONS EST MISSOURI 185 



phase of the Woodland in Illinois. I should expect a similar author- 

 ship for the multiple and single vaults in Pike and Ralls Counties, Mo., 

 and Adams County, 111. 



Whether all the stone vaults were erected at about the same general 

 period, that is, within the space of two or three generations, I am 

 unable to state. Neither have I any convictions regarding the direc- 

 tion in which the vault-building idea traveled, or in which locality it 

 first appeared, or from what it developed. In Boone County Berry 

 et al. (1938) found evidence of an earlier burial complex in the form 

 of slab-lined cists directly underlying a vault. Fowke (1910, p. 36), 

 on the other hand, found a shallow cist grave built intrusively over 

 a vault in Dawson mound 11. No stratigraphic evidence of an earlier, 

 possibly ancestral, method has been reported in the Kansas City area. 

 Cist graves, so widely used in southeast Missouri, southern Illinois, and 

 in parts of Kentucky and Tennessee, may well have a wide temporal 

 distribution as well — a distribution that preceded as well as followed 

 a relatively brief era of stone vault building farther west. Possibly 

 the use of vaults with coursed walls of stone developed, in some as 

 yet unclear manner, out of the much simpler slab-lined cist. In this 

 event, the more easterly vaults might be the earlier, and those at Kansas 

 City would represent the climax of the trait-complex. On the other 

 hand, the presence of an island of Hopewellian-like peoples near 

 Kansas City, far to the west of their hitherto known range, could be 

 attributed to migration. This, in turn, raises the question of whether 

 such a population, retaining an earlier notion of interment in en- 

 closures within mounds, might have turned from log- to stone-walled 

 tombs in its new habitat. Here, too, one would expect transitional 

 stages of which no trace has yet been reported. For the present I 

 prefer to reserve judgment on this point, but of the two alternatives 

 suggested above, I am inclined to view the Kansas City area as the 

 culmination rather than as the hearth of the stone-vault concept. 

 We may hope that future intensive researches, especially in mounds 

 along some of the little-known portions of the lower Missouri Valley, 

 will eventually resolve these problems and shed further light on one 

 of the most intriguing phases of the archeology of the region. 



RESUME 



The data accumulated in course of the explorations and laboratory 

 studies described in the foregoing pages are incomplete in many 

 particulars. Aside from the deficiencies inherent in any analysis of 

 archeological materials, it should be pointed out that the present 

 paper is based on a survey rather than on a thoroughgoing compre- 

 hensive program of excavation. Most of the information on village 

 remains comes from two sites, and at neither did we uncover more 



4972G1— 43 13 



