YARROW.) CAVE BURIAL—ALASKA 129 
anameless creek, about two miles from Abbey’s Ferry, on the road to Vallicito, at 
the house of Mr. Robinson. There were two or three persons with me, who had been 
to the place before and knew that the skulls in question were taken from it. Their 
visit was some ten years ago, and since that the condition of things in the cave has 
greatly changed. Owing to some alteration in the road, mining operations, or some 
other cause which I could not ascertain, there has accumulated on the formerly clean 
stalagmitic floor of the cave a thickness of some 20 feet of surface earth that com- 
pletely conceals the bottom, and which could not be removed without considerable 
expense. This cave is about 27 feet deep at the mouth and 40 to 50 feet at the end, 
and perhaps 30 feet in diameter. It is the general opinion of those who have noticed 
this cave and saw it years ago that it was a burying-place of the present Indians. 
Dr. Jones said he found remains of bows and arrows and charcoal with the skulls he 
obtained, and which were destroyed at the time the village of Murphy’s was burned. 
All the people spoke of the skulls as lying on the surface and not as buried in the 
stalagmite. 
The next description of cave burial, by W. H. Dall*, is so remarkable 
that it seems worthy of admittance to this paper. It relates probably to 
the Innuits of Alaska. 
The earliest remains of man found in Alaska up to the time of writing I refer to 
this epoch [Echinus layer of Dall]. There are some crania found by us in the lower- 
most part of the Amaknak cave and a cranium obtained at Adakh, near the anchorage 
in the Bay of Islands. These were deposited in a remarkable manner, precisely simi- 
lar to that adopted by most of the continental Innuit, but equally different from the 
modern Aleut fashion. At the Amaknak cave we found what at first appeared to be 
a wooden inclosure, but which proved to be made of the very much decayed supra- 
maxillary bones of some large cetacean. These were arranged so as to form a rude 
rectangular inclosure covered over with similar pieces of bone. This was somewhat 
less than 4 feet long, 2 feet wide, and 18 inches deep. The bottom was formed of flat 
pieces of stone. Three such were found close together, covered with and filled by an 
accumulation of fine vegetable and organic mold. In each was the remains of a skel- 
eton in the last stages of decay. It had evidently been tied up in the Innuit fashion 
to get it into its narrow house, but all the bones, with the exception of the skull, 
were reduced to a soft paste, or even entirely gone. At Adakh a fancy prompted me 
to dig into a small knoll near the ancient shell-heap, and here we found, in a precisely 
similar sarcophagus, the remains of a skeleton, of which also only the cranium re- 
tained sufficient consistency to admit of preservation. This inclosure, however, was 
filled with a dense peaty mass not reduced to mold, the result of centuries of sphag- 
nous growth, which had reached a thickness of nearly 2 feet above the remains. 
When we reflect upon the well-known slowness of this kind of growth in these north- 
ern regions, attested by numerous Arctic travelers, the antiquity of the remains 
becomes evident. 
It seems beyond doubt that in the majority of cases, especially as re- 
gards the caves of the Western States and Territories, the interments 
were primary ones, and this is likewise true of many of the caverns of 
Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, for in the three States mentioned many 
mummies have been found, but it is also likely that such receptacles 
were largely used as places of secondary deposits. The many fragment- 
ary skeletons and loose bones found seem to strengthen this view. 
STAB * Contrib. to N. A. Ethnol., 1877, vol. 1, p. 62. 
