598 
PREHISTORIC VILLAGES IN TENNESSEE 
but she left it clean. No untidy pottery fragments or broken animal 
bones or ashes were left scattered over the floor. This is clearly seen 
in the portion of the floor shown in Plate 136, b. This photograph 
shows the floor just as she left it and brings out vividly one very 
common feature of this ancient family life—the burial of the bodies 
of young children beneath the floor of the mother’s wigwam. The 
projecting stone-slab sides of one of the coffins are seen to rise from 
1 to 2 inches aboye the floor near the upright pick. The stone-slab 
top of these graves had presumably been removed by the plow. The 
sides of the other grave (I) in this circle projected above the floor 
[eTH. ANN. 41 
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i Pile stones \ 
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Vertical section of soi covering. 
Fic. 200.—Diagram of circle No. 17 
in the same way. When the wigwam was inhabited the stone-slab 
tops of these little graves must have risen above the floor to a height 
of 3 or 4 inches. 
THE CENTRAL FIRE BOWL AND CONNECTING GRAVE 
The fire bowl, near the center of the floor, was 22 inches in diameter 
and 7 inches deep. It was shaped very much like a modern wash- 
basin. <A hole of this shape had been made in the earthen floor and 
the cavity and a little of the adjoining floor had been covered and 
smoothly plastered with puddled clay, forming a rounded, plastered 
bowl almost as smooth in the interior as our modern earthenware 
washbowls. 
One side of the fire bowl had been cut away in order to allow an 
upright stone slab to be placed as shown in Plate 136, 6. The body 
of a child about 12 years of age had then been buried against the 
eastern side of the slab with the head resting within the edge of the 
