NO. 1C ARCHEOLOGY OF MIMBRES VALLEY FEWKES 9 



large proportion of cases the body was placed upon its back, feet drawn up 

 against the body, knees higher than the head ; sometimes the head was face up 

 and sometimes it was pressed forward so the top of the head was uppermost. 

 In other interments the body was extended its full length with face up. A 

 large majority of the skulls had a bowl 1 inverted over them, though I judge. 



twenty per cent were without any bowl In a great many instances after 



the body had been placed in the grave with bowl over the head, a little soil was 

 filled in, and about one foot of adobe mud was added and tramped down then 

 filled up with soil. This adobe mud is almost like rock, making it difficult to 



dig up the bowl without smashing it No article of any kind except 



the bowl over the head was found in any grave. In one case a bowl was found 

 with a skull under it and under that skull was another bowl and another skull. 



Few evidences of upright walls of buildings are found at or near 

 this site. The surface of the ground in places rises into low mounds 

 devoid of bushes, which grow sparingly in the immediate neighbor- 

 hood, but no trees of any considerable size were noticed in the 

 vicinity. Before work began at this place the only signs of former 

 occupancy by aborigines, besides walls, were a few broken fragments 

 of ancient pottery, metates, or a burnt stump protruding here and 

 there from the ground. None of the house walls projected very high 

 above the surface of the ground. Excavations in the floors of rooms 

 at this point yielded so many human skeletons that the place was com- 

 monly referred to as a cemetery, but all indications support the con- 

 clusion that it was probably a village site with intramural interments. 



The human burials here found had knees flexed or drawn to the 

 breast in the " contracted " position, sometimes with the face turned 

 eastward. The skeletons were sometimes found in shallow graves, 

 but often were buried deeply below the surface. Almost without 

 exception the crania had bowls fitted over them like caps. The graves 

 as a rule are limited to soft ground, the bowls resting on undisturbed 

 sand devoid of human remains. In some instances there appears to 

 have been a hardened crust of clay above the remains, possibly all 

 that is left of the floor of a dwelling. The indications are that here, 

 as elsewhere, the dead were buried under the floors of dwellings, as 

 is commonly the case throughout the Mimbres Valley. While there 

 is not enough of the walls above ground to show the former extent 



1 On some of the skulls excavated at Sikyatki, Arizona, in 1895, the author 

 found concave disks of kaolin perforated in the center. One of these disks 

 is represented in Fig. 356, p. 729, I7th Ann. Rep. Bur. Amer. Ethnol. In an 

 article on " Urn Burial in the United States " (Amer. Anthrop., vol. 6, No. 5), 

 Mr. Clarence B. Moore, quoting his own observations and those of many others, 

 records burials in which an inverted mortar, bowl, basket, or other object was 

 placed over the skull of the dead, and shows the wide distribution of the 

 custom. 



