66 Some Considerations on the Mound Builders. 



indicate that these tribes had a strongly centralized, if 

 not despotic, government. 



Living, as they did, in great numbers exclusively 

 along the rich river valleys, this race must have been an 

 agricultural people. There are no traces of their having 

 had any domestic animals ; but bones in some of the 

 mounds show that they hunted game. 



They had some engineering skill. The extensive 

 works of geometrical outline, in the Scioto Valley, 

 squares, octagons, circles, ellipses, often combined to- 

 gether, are executed with such precision that they must 

 have had some means of measuring angles. It would 

 be no mean task for our engineers to construct them on 

 such a scale with equal exactitude. And the number of 

 the squares that measure exactly one thousand and 

 eighty feet on each side show that they had some stand- 

 ard of measurement. 



Their dwellings have disappeared, leaving no trace, 

 unless the flat mounds with graded ascents, as at Mari- 

 etta, were platforms whereon stood a temple and the 

 chief's house, as like mounds were used in the South 

 three hundred and thirty years ago ; and unless the small 

 circular embankments are the crumbled remains of mud 

 walls surrounding dwellings of the people, like the huts 

 of the Mandans in the Northwest. 



Their pottery was superior in manufacture and in 

 tasteful design to the ordinary pottery of the Indians. 



Their stone pipes, even of the simplest form, like the 

 one in the Historical Society collection in this city, has 

 a certain artistic feeling which is lacking in the pipes of 

 the modern Indian. Some of those found by Squire and 

 Davis have very spirited representations of birds and 



