CAVE BURIAL— ALASKA. 33 



the general opinion of those who have noticed this cave and saw it years 

 ago that it was a burying-place of the present Indians. Dr. Jones said he 

 found remains of bows and arrows and charcoal with the skulls he obtained, 

 and which were destroyed at the time the village of Murphy's was burned. 

 All the people spoke of the skulls as lying on the surface and not as buried 

 in the stalagmite." 



The next description of cave burial, described by W. H. Dall*, is 

 so remarkable that it seems worthy of admittance to this paper. It relates 

 probably to the Innuit of Alaska. 



" The earliest remains of man found in Alaska up to the time of writ- 

 ing I refer to this epoch [Echinus layer of Dall]. There are some crania 

 found by us in the lowermost part of the Amaknak cave and a cra- 

 nium obtained at Adakh, near the anchorage in the Bay of Islands. These 

 were deposited in a remarkable manner, precisely similar to that adopted 

 by most of the continental Innuit, but equally different from the modern 

 Aleut fashion. At the Amaknak cave we found what at first appeared 

 to be a wooden inclosure, but which proved to be made of the very 

 much decayed supra-maxillary bones of some large cetacean. These 

 were arranged so as to form a rude rectangular inclosure covered over 

 with similar pieces of bone. This was somewhat less than 4 feet long, 2 

 feet wide, and 18 inches deep. The bottom was formed of flat pieces of 

 stone. Three such were found close together, covered with and filled by an 

 accumulation of fine vegetable and organic mold. In each was the remains 

 of a skeleton in the last stages of decay. It had evidently been tied up in 

 the Innuit fashion to get it into its narrow house, but all the bones, with the 

 exception of the skull, were reduced to a soft paste, or even entirely gone. 

 At Adakh a fancy prompted me to dig into a small knoll near the ancient 

 shell-heap; and here we found, in a precisely similar sarcophagus, the 

 remains of a skeleton, of which also only the cranium retained sufficient 

 consistency to admit of preservation. This inclosure, however, was filled 

 with a dense peaty mass not reduced to mold, the result of centuries of 

 sphagnous growth, which had reached a thickness of nearly 2 feet above 

 the remains. When we reflect upon the well-known slowness of this kind 



* Contrib. to N. A. Ethnol., 1877, vol. 1, p. 62. 

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