62 Some Considerations on the Mound Builders. 



Soto's time. The absence of tradition among the In- 

 dians, therefore, does not prove much ; and the In- 

 dians whom De Soto found, used the truncated mounds 

 so habitually as an elevated base for the dwellings of 

 the chiefs, that it was taken for granted they were the 

 work of the Indians. Indeed, one of the narrators, 

 Garcilaso de la Vega, describes their manner of con- 

 structing them. 



But some indication of the age of these monuments 

 is afforded by the forest growth which covers them. 

 Dr. Hildreth said a tree eight hundred years old was 

 felled on one of the mounds at Marietta. Squire and 

 Davis say trees six hundred years old stood on the fort 

 on Paint creek, west of Chillicothe. Mr. Barrandt 

 says he observed a tree six hundred years old upon one 



tainly attribute to the people that constructed the mounds. 

 Another, found in Tennessee, was determined by similar proof. 

 Another was taken from a chamber in the centre of the Grave 

 Creek mound. 



These completed the list of certainly authenticated Mound 

 Builders' skulls. As to these, Dr. Foster simply says they are 

 not like the type that he calls the Mound Builders' skull, but re- 

 semble the crania of Indians, and therefore are not of the Mound 

 Builders But Mr. Jones, in Georgia, has, with the same exacti- 

 tude, identified one' more skull (Antiquities of Southern Indians, 

 p. 1 60), and to this Dr. Foster will have to make the same ob- 

 jection. And Dr. Jeffreys Wyman, of Harvard, as cited in Dr. 

 Foster's book, speaking of twenty-four crania sent to him by the 

 late S. S. Lyon, of Kentucky, as skulls of the Mound Builders, 

 says, " A comparison of these crania with those of the other and 

 later Indians, show that they have some marked peculiarities, 

 though they are better appreciated when the two kinds are placed 

 side by side, than from any table of measurement or verbal de- 

 scription." 



