554 PREHISTORIC VILLAGES IN TENNESSEE [ETH. ANN. 41 
one or two wigwams. These were burned either at the time the 
inhabitants left or later. If they had fled hurriedly before an attack, 
they would probably have burned all the buildings to prevent their 
falling into the hands of the enemy. If the town had been taken 
and not inhabited by the enemy, the enemy would have burned it 
if they expected the old inhabitants to return. 
Everything points to an orderly desertion of the site and a slow 
and gradual decay and covering up of the deserted village with black 
loam. 
PROBABLE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE GORDON 
TOWN AND MADISONVILLE, OHIO 
There is evidence to show some probable relationship between the 
Gordon people and those at Madisonville, Ohio, in the outskirts of 
Cincinnati. The little Gordon skeletal material that has been 
unearthed appears to resemble that of Madisonville.” The culture 
of Gordon also somewhat resembles that of Madisonville. 
The similarity of some of the artifacts of the Gordon region to 
those of Madisonyille is very noticeable.*! 
The people on both the Gordon and Madisonville sites buried their 
dead extended at full length and on the back. Both sometimes 
buried the skeleton after decay of the flesh. Gordon used stone-slab 
coffins; Madisonville did not. At Gordon the slabs could be easily 
obtained, being found lying loose in the bed of the neighboring brook. 
At Madisonville slabs could be obtained only by quarrying them 
with very great labor from horizontally bedded stone. This was a 
work of almost prohibitive difficulty to men of the stone age. 
The use of the cache pits uncovered at Gordon site appears to have 
been somewhat different from that of those found by Doctor Swanton 
and others at Madisonville. The Gordon pits contained no bones 
or pottery fragments and were filled solely with loose black soil. 
They were in the floors of buildings which had apparently been used 
for sacred purposes. Those at Madisonville probably were used as 
domestic storage pits and for similar purposes. Possibly the future 
excavation of some of the spaces between house circles at Gordon 
may show similar domestic storage pits. 
The owl was represented in the cultures of both towns. (Pls. 119, 
b; 120, a.) 
Several symbols found at Madisonville resemble similar ones found 
on sites in middle Tennessee which are related to Gordon. These 
furnish indirect evidence of relationship between Gordon and Madi- 
sonville. 
30 See Doctor Hrdliéka’s report, p. 612. 
31 See pls. 1, 16, 17, 18, 20, 23, and 24 and figs. 2and 5, Hooton and Willoughby, “Indian Village Site and 
Cemetery near Madisonville, Ohio,’ Papers Peabody Museum, Harvard Univ., vol. 8, no. 1. 
