YARROW.] PARTIAL SCAFFOLD BURIAL AND OSSUARIES. 169 
Jones* quotes one of the older writers, as follows, regarding the 
Natchez tribe: 
Among the Natchez the dead were either inhumed or placed in tombs. These tombs 
were located within or very near their temples. They rested upon four forked sticks 
fixed fast in the ground, and were raised some three feet above the earth. About eight 
feet long and a foot and a half wide, they were prepared for the reception of a single 
corpse. After the body was placed upon it, a basket-work of twigs was woven around 
and covered with mud, an opening being left at the head, through which food was 
presented to the deceased. When the flesh had all rotted away, the bones were taken 
out, placed in a box made of canes, and then deposited in the temple. The common 
dead were mourned and lamented for a period of three days. Those who fell in battle 
were honored with a more protracted and grievous lamentation. 
Bartram t gives a somewhat different account from Roman of burial 
among the Choctaws of Carolina: 
The Chactaws pay their last duties and respect to the deceased in a very different 
manner. As soon asa person is dead, they erect a scaffold 18 or 20 feet high in a 
grove adjacent to the town, where they lay the corps, lightly covered with a mantle ; 
here it is suffered to remain, visited and protected by the friends and relations, until 
the flesh becomes putrid, so as easily to part from the bones; then undertakers, who 
make it their business, carefully strip the flesh from the bones, wash and cleanse them, 
and when dry and purified by the air, having provided a curiously-wrought chest or 
coffin, fabricated of bones and splints, they place all the bones therein, whichis deposited 
in the bone-house, a building erected for that purpose in every town; and when this 
house isfull a general solemn funeral takes place ; when the nearest kindred or friends 
of the deceased, on a day appointed, repair to the bone-house, take up the respective 
coffins, and, following one another in order of seniority, the nearest relations and con- 
nections attending their respective corps, and the multitude following after them, all 
as one family, with united voice of alternate allelujah and lamentation, slowly pro- 
ceeding on to the place of general interment, when they place the coffins in order, 
forming a pyramid; { and, lastly, cover all over with earth, which raises a conical 
hill or mount; when they return to town in order of solemn procession, concluding 
the day with a festival, which is called the feast of the dead. 
Morgan § also alludes to this mode of burial: 
The body of the deceased was exposed upon a bark scaffolding erected upon poles or 
secured upon the limbs of trees, where is was left to waste to a skeleton. After this 
had been effected by the process of decomposition in the open air, the bones were 
removed either to the former house of the deceased, or to a small bark-house by its 
side, prepared for their reception. In this manner the skeletons of the whole family 
were preserved from generation to generation by the filial or parental affection of the 
living. After the lapse of a number of years, or in a season of public insecurity, or on 
the eve of abandoning a settlement, it was customary to collect these skeletons from 
the whole community around and consign them to a common resting-place. 
To this custom, which is not confined to the Iroquois, is doubtless to be ascribed 
the burrows and bone-mounds which have been found in such numbers in various 
*Antiquities of the Southern Indians, 1873, p. 105. 
t Bartram’s Travels, 1791, p. 516. 
¢ “Some ingenious men whom I have conversed with have given it as their opinion 
that all those pyramidal artificial hills, usually called Indian mounds, were raised on 
this occasion, and are generally sepulchers. However, I am of different opinion.” 
§ League of the Iroquois, 1851, p. 173. 
