220 HOUSES AND HOUSE-LIFE OF THE AMERICAN ABORIGINES. 
period of their occupation was ancient. Their withdrawal was probably 
gradual, and completed before the advent of the ancestors of the present 
tribes, or simultaneous with their arrival. It seems more likely that their 
retirement from the country was voluntary than that they were expelled by 
an influx of wild tribes. If their expulsion had been the result of a pro- 
tracted warfare, all remembrance of so remarkable an event would scarcely 
have been lost among the tribes by whom they were displaced. A warm 
climate was necessary for the successful maintenance of the highest form 
of Village Indian life. In the struggle for existence in this cold climate 
Indian arts and ingenuity must have been taxed quite as heavily to provide 
clothing as food. It is therefore not improbable that the attempt to trans- 
plant the New Mexican type of village life into the valley of the Ohio 
proved a failure, and that after great efforts, continued through centuries of 
time, it was finally abandoned by their withdrawal, first into the gulf region 
through which they entered, and, lastly, from the country altogether. 
The Tlasealans practiced cremation, but it was generally limited to the 
chiefs... It was the same among the Aztecs. ‘Others were burnt and the 
ashes buried in the temples, but they were all interred with whatever things 
of value they possessed.? The Mayas of Yucatan came nearer the Romans 
in the practice, for they preserved the ashes in earthen vessels. ‘The dead 
were much lamented,” remarks Herrera, ‘in silence by day and with dismal 
shrieks by night * * * filling their mouths with ground wheat [maize] 
that they might not want food in the other world. * * * ‘The bodies 
of their lords were burnt and their ashes put into large vessels, over which 
temples were built. Some made wooden statues of their parents, and leavy- 
ing an hollow in the necks of them, put in their ashes and kept them among 
”3 In New Mexico cremation is occasion- 
their idols with great veneration. 
ally practiced at the present time. 
That the Mound-Builders should have had this custom, in view of 
its prevalence among the Village Indians, would afford no cause of surprise. 
I think we may, not without reason, recognize in this artificial basin of clay 
a cremation bed, upon which the body was placed in a sitting posture, 
covered with fuel, and then burned—in some cases partially, and in others 
! Herrera’s Hist. America, ii, 302. 2Tb., iii, 220. 3Tb., iv, 175. 
