﻿NO. 7 SMITHSONIAN EXPLORATIONS, I926 259 



were simply piles of earth, containing nothing whatever to signify 

 the reason for their existence. Had it not been for some charcoal, 

 worked flint, and broken pottery, they might have been deemed 

 natural formations. Two others were merely foundations for houses, 

 but each showed plainly that at least two, perhaps three, houses had 

 been erected on the same site, the later ones on new foundations a1)Ove 

 the old. 



The last two mounds, one fifteen feet, the other twenty feet high, 

 were tumuli. In the first a number of bodies had been placed either on 

 the natural surface or in shallow graves, and the mound erected over 

 them, apparently as a continuous operation. There was no evidence 

 of a burial in the body of the structure. 



The largest mound was c{uite different in its arrangement. There 

 were no skeletons at the bottom, the first step having been to build up 

 a platform of earth to an elevation of eighteen or twenty inches. On 

 this a number of bodies had been placed, how many could not he even 

 guessed, as all the bones were completely decayed and had no more 

 consistency than wet chalk or ashes. They entirely covered a space 

 several feet across. The mound had then been carried up over them 

 to a height of about fifteen feet. Scattered through the earth for this 

 entire distance were traces of burials, made as the work progressed, 

 so the construction must have been intermittent or desultory, although 

 there was no stratification or other marks to demonstrate this. Finally, 

 the tumulus in this stage was finished. 



Later, though it was impossible to estimate how much time may 

 have elapsed, two large graves were dug in the top of the mound, 

 several bodies placed in each, the graves filled, and the mound then 

 added to until it was five feet higher, with a proportional increase in 

 diameter. But the addition was largely on one side. The point be- 

 neath the apex as it was first built, was several feet away from the 

 corresponding point in the mound as completed. 



No implements or manufactured objects of any character of stone, 

 shell, or bone were found in any of the mounds. There was some 

 pottery — not much — and that crude, and except for two pots, neither 

 of which is of two ounces capacity, all of it was broken. A\ ith a 

 few skeletons were fragments of pots which had been entire when 

 deposited, but had been broken from pressure. Some of them had 

 decorations of incised or impressed lines and figui-es. A study of 

 these, and comparison with other pottery in the southern territory, 

 may furnish a clue as to the tribal affiliations of these Mound 

 Builders, but unless so, there seems little hope of discovering their 

 identity. 



