94 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [BULL, 37 
courteous and obliging. The information was practically the same in 
every instance, and may be condensed into a few paragraphs. 
The principal finds were almost invariably made on the sites of 
villages, generally in the immediate vicinity of mounds, though 
often several hundred yards from the nearest one. Usually one, 
sometimes two, rarely three, pots are found with a skeleton. Occa- 
sionally there is a burial mound in which many bodies have been 
interred. In one which was nearly effaced by cultivation the first 
intimation that it might yield anything was the uncovering of 
pottery fragments in plowing. This was explored by Mr. Thomas 
Beckwith, of Charleston, who found the base to be 4 feet lower than 
the surrounding level. Whether this had been a burial pit filled and 
covered, or whether the field had been built up to that extent by 
deposits after the mound was made, he was unable to say; but 
skeletons and pottery were found everywhere from top to bottom, 
the lowest of them in standing or soil water. Exactly 300 pots 
were saved, including practically every size, shape, style, and degree 
of finish found in the region. There were also two human effigies 
carved in sandstone. . 
Though fine specimens are occasionally found in them, the larger 
mounds as a rule contain very little; and it would seem from the 
descriptions of the position and manner in which skeletons or relies 
are placed, that they were mostly deposited in the course of uprear- 
ing a structure which was primarily intended for some purpose other 
than that of sepulture. 
There are real mortuary mounds from which pottery is procured 
in greater or less amounts, but compared with the total number 
these are few. Probably 90 per cent, or even more, of mounds 
in the territory comprising and adjacent to the ‘Sunk Lands” were 
erected with some end in view which did not include either funeral 
rites or the concealment of relics. 
The prospectors of twenty to thirty years ago proceeded system- 
atically; they used long steel probing rods with which they tested 
almost every foot of a field they wished to explore. There are no 
stones, scarcely a pebble, in this alluvial soil; consequently when the 
rod met with an obstacle the searcher could be almost certain it was 
an implement, a piece of pottery, or other artificial object. In this 
way they soon learned in what sort of situation or amid what sort 
of surroundings a village site and its associated cemetery were likely 
to be found; and when one was discovered they usually exhausted 
its possibilities before going elsewhere. Further, a series of fruitless 
excavations taught them that mounds made of earth so hard the 
probe would not readily penetrate it would almost certainly be 
destitute of contents, or, if otherwise, that articles of pottery would 
be broken by pressure. So, in time, the prospectors became quite 
