YARROW.] STONE GRAVES OR CISTS. lie 
tached to the canoe, drag it into the woods, followed by the music and the crowd, 
Here the pitpan is lowered into the grave with bow, arrow, spear, paddle, and other 
implements to serve the departed in the land beyond ; then the other half of the boat 
is placed over the body. <A rude hut is constructed over the grave, serving as a re- 
ceptacle for the choice food, drink, and other articles placed there from time to time 
by relatives. 
STONE GRAVES OF CISTS. 
These are of considerable interest, not only from their somewhat rare 
occurrence, except in certain localities, but from the manifest care taken 
by the survivors to provide for the dead what they considered a suita- 
ble resting-place. In their construction they resemble somewhat, in the 
care that is taken to prevent the earth touching the corpse, the class of 
graves previously described. 
A number of cists have been found in Tennessee, and are thus de- 
scribed by Moses Fiske : * 
There are many burying-grounds in West Tennessee with regular graves. They dug 
them 12 or 18 inches deep, placed slabs at the bottom, ends and sides, forming a kind 
of stone coffin, and, after laying in the body, covered it over with earth. 
It may be added that, in 1873, the writer assisted at the opening of a 
number of graves of men of the reindeer period, near Solutré, in France, 
and they were almost identical in construction with those described by 
Mr. Fiske, with the exception that the latter were deeper; this, how- 
ever, may be accounted for if it is considered how great a deposition of 
earth may have taken place during the many centuries which have 
elapsed since the burial. Many of the graves explored by the writer in 
1875, at Santa Barbara, resembled somewhat cist graves, the bottom 
and sides of the pit being lined with large flat stones, but there were 
none directly over the skeletons. 
The next account is by Maj. J. W. Powell, the result of his own ob- 
servation in Tennessee : 
The burial places, or cemeteries, are exceedingly abundant throughout the State. 
Often hundreds of graves may be found on a single hillside. The same people some- 
times bury in scattered graves and in mounds—the mounds being composed of a large 
number of cist graves. The graves are increased by additions from time to time. 
The additions are sometimes placed above and sometimes at the sides of the others. 
In the first burials there is a tendency to a concentric system with the feet towards 
the center, but subsequent burials are more irregular, so that the system is finally 
abandoned before the place is desired for cemetery purposes. 
Some other peculiarities are of interest. A larger number of interments exhibit the 
fact that the bodies were placed there before the decay of the flesh, and in many in- 
stances collections of bones are buried. Sometimes these bones are placed in some 
order about the crania, and sometimes in irregular piles, as if the collection of bones 
had been emptied from a sack. With men, pipes, stone hammers, knives, arrowheads, 
&c., were usually found; with women, pottery, rude beads, shells, &c.; with children, 
toys of pottery, beads, curious pebbles, &c. 
Sometimes, in the subsequent burials, the side slab of a previous burial was used 
as a portion of the second cist. All of the cists were covered with slabs. 
* Trans. Amer. Antiq. Soc., 1820, vol. i, p. 302, 
8AE 
