Some Considerations on the Mound Builders. 61 



Middle Tennessee were wholly uninhabited in the lat- 

 ter half of the seventeenth century. Though it is com- 

 monly stated that De Soto visited the Cherokees, I do 

 not find the statement supported by the original nar- 

 ratives of De Soto's expedition. The Creeks and Ala- 

 bamas arrived in the Southern States later than De 



burial down to the present century, in Illinois (lb., p. 220). It 

 would, therefore, be of some interest to know whether the skulls 

 from Merom, described by Dr. Foster, were taken from the 

 mounds, or were those taken from the stone graves. 



The skulls and fragments found near Chicago were dug from 

 little mounds — the loam of the prairie heaped up two and a half 

 feet high. The Indians sometimes heaped such mounds over 

 their dead. And Dr. Foster indeed says, that some of these 

 very mounds were the burying-places of Indians and half-breeds. 



As for the skull found at Dunleith, three were taken from a 

 mound there twelve feet high. Of two, we have no information. 

 The third, the one described by Dr. Foster, was buried two feet 

 under the surface, in a grave made of wood and stone. This 

 was obviously not an original, but an intrusive interment ; and 

 therefore, according to all accepted inference, was the grave, not 

 of a Mound Builder, but of a modern Indian. 



There is nothing in Dr. Foster's statement, therefore, that 

 shows these crania to be relics of the Mound Builders ; and their 

 form, as he describes it, is the form of the skull of an Indian idiot. 



Other investigators have been very careful in determining the 

 character of interments. Squire and Davis, in all their re- 

 searches, found but one preserved skull which they could say was 

 certainly that of a Mound Builder. This was found on the nat- 

 ural surface of the ground, under the centre of a mound that was 

 covered by the primitive forest, one of the Chillicothe system of 

 mounds. The skeleton was surrounded by burnt debris, covered 

 by a sheet of mica, and the soil of the mound was clay, impervi- 

 ous to water, and had evidently not been disturbed. Dr. Lap- 

 ham, in his exhaustive examination of the mounds of Wisconsin, 

 found only one skull which, by similar indications, he could cer- 



