MYER] GORDON TOWN SITE 549 
So far as could be discovered by inquiry and search and by testing 
with a sounding rod’ there were no burials outside the walls of the 
town. 
The stone-slab graves were made as follows: A pit was dug to a 
depth of from 30 to 50 inches. This pit was the length and width 
of the stone coffin desired. Then the unworked limestone slabs were 
set up around the sides. In a few cases the bottom was lined with 
fragments of domestic pottery. The body was placed in the coffin, 
on its back, and usually extended full length, with arms at sides. 
The mortuary vessels were placed in the coffin, usually near the head, 
and the coffin filled with earth containing scattering periwinkles and 
the stone-slab top placed on the coffin. After this top was in place 
the earth was thrown back in the grave in the same manner as a 
modern white would fill up a shallow grave after the coffin had been 
placed therein. 
In many of the stone-slab burials in other portions of middle Ten- 
nessee no earth was placed in the coffin. The author has often found 
them with joints so carefully constructed and protected that little or 
no earth succeeded in filtering into the interior. When the top of 
the coffin was removed the skeleton and mortuary vessels would be 
as free from earth as on the day they had been placed therein. 
WALLS AROUND GORDON TOWN 
It was hoped that some faint trace would be found of the decayed 
ancient wooden palisades which doubtless had been embedded in 
and surmounted the earthen embankment which now encircles this 
town. 
Search was begun in the eastern wall, at the poimt where house 
circle No. 58 touches the wall. Four test trenches were dug, extend- 
ing along the lines of the wall embankment, 5, 7, 4, and 5 feet, respec- 
tively, in length. They extended down into the original clay subsoil. 
The 7-foot trench was dug in the first bastion in the embankment, 
to the north of circle No. 58. This bastion trench was 7 feet north 
to south and 15 feet east to west. In none of these trenches was there 
the slightest trace of the ancient palisades or their postholes. Here, 
as everywhere in this old town, all traces of the original wooden con- 
struction had disappeared, save in the cases where the wood had 
been charred. 
The test trenches revealed that this site probably had been in- 
habited for a considerable time before the wall was raised. The soil 
contained very few fragments of pottery—about one-fourth the pro- 
portion found in the soil filling the interior of the house circles. The 
soil around the spots where the test trenches were dug in the wall 
could not be expected to have as rapid an accumulation of pottery 
fragments as in the house interiors or in the central portions of the 
