14 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [ BULL, 62 
had ‘‘chosen to live back of the two other tribes and formed a kind 
of a bulwark for their protection. . . . They extended their set- 
tlements from the Minnisink, a place named after them, where they 
had their council seat and fire, quite up to the Hudson on the east, 
and to the west or southwest far beyond the ‘Susquehannah’; their 
northern boundaries were supposed originally to be the heads of the 
great rivers Susquehannah and Delaware, and their southern bounda- 
ries that ridge of hills known in New Jersey by the name of Musca- 
necun, and in Pennsylvania, by those of Lehigh, Cohnewago, ete.’’! 
This is evidently one of the rare instances in which it is possible 
to make a clear tribal identification of older skeletal remains in 
eastern North America, and it is also an instance in which the con- 
tents of graves enable a fairly close estimate of the age of the site. 
The artifacts found with the various burials include a number of 
objects introduced by early settlers, a fact that shows the cemetery 
to be of historic date. Furthermore, one of the skeletons is that of 
a tall white man of Scandinavian or Nordic type, possibly one of the 
Dutch, English, or Swedes who reached the upper valley after 1614. 
As the remainder of the skeletons do not indicate any trace of ad- 
mixture of white blood, the cemetery may be regarded as dating 
from the period of the earlier contact of the Indian and Caucasian 
races, or probably from the latter part of the seventeenth or the 
beginning of the eighteenth century. It was surely earlier than 1740, 
for in that year the main body of the Munsee was forced to move 
from the Delaware, settling first on the Susquehanna and soon after 
on the Allegheny River in Pennsylvania, where some of them had 
gone as early as 1724. 
An event of anthropological importance in connection with the 
Munsee before their removal from the Delaware is noted by Rutten- 
ber.? In the latter part of the seventeenth century, at the outbreak 
of hostilities between the Five Nations and the French, the advance 
of the Iroquois in the south was being contested by the Shawnee, who 
at that time were also engaged in war with the Cherokee. ‘In the 
latter they [the Shawnee] suffered severely, and but for the timely aid 
of the Mahicans would have been destroyed. The Lenapes [Delawares] 
invited them to remove to their country; the invitation being ac- 
cepted, the Minsis brought the matter to the attention of the govern- 
ment of New York, in September, 1692, on an application to permit 
their settlement in the Minnisink country. The council gave its 
assent on condition that they should first make peace with the Five 
Nations.* This was soon effected, and the messengers departed, ac- 
1 Quoted from Hrdli¢ka, The Crania of Trenton, op. cit., pp. 32-33. 
2 Ruttenber, History of the Indian Tribes of Hudson’s River, p. 178. 
8 “River Indians returned from a residence with the Shawanoes, brought with them some Shawanoes 
