STONE GRAVES OF BRENTWOOD, TENN, 527 



tery, or with small, flat stones ; the sides and ends formed by great slabs of lime- 

 stone, and the whole covered in with one or more slabs of limestone. The aver- 

 age length of the large graves is six feet, their width averages about eighteen 

 inches and their depth ten inches. The slabs forming the sides and ends are sunk 

 a few inches below the level of the bottom of the grave. The covering stones 

 sometimes fitted tightly, but often they were laid across and covered by others, 

 in one case even to the number of fifteen. Besides these large graves small graves, 

 one to two feet long, occur, in some of which the bones are found out of the 

 natural position, as if they had been brought to this place for re-interment; other 

 small graves are those of children. In most of the graves only the bones of a 

 single skeleton were found, but some contained the remains of two or more bod- 

 ies, and in several graves there were skeletons of adults and children. It was 

 from finding the bones of children and from the size of the smaller graves that 

 there arose in early American archaeology the story of a race of pygmies. 



" From the eighty graves explored at Brentwood I succeeded in removing 

 forty skulls and many skeletons One grave five feet nine inches long by two 

 jeet wide and one foot deep, contained the remains of five bodies; — three of adults 

 and two of children. Two of the adult crania have a persistent suture down the 

 middle of the frontal bone, which is rare in the crania of barbarous people, so 

 that it is rather remarkable to have found two skulls presenting this feature in the 

 same grave. A very great intricacy of the sutures of the back of the head is a 

 common character among short-headed people, but, besides numerous supernu- 

 merary bones in this region, one skull shows a suture across the parietal never 

 before seen in our collection. Several other skulls are remarkable, one for the 

 great projection of the jaw, another for anchylosis of the skull and first vertebra 

 of the neck, greatly impairing the freedom of movement of the head; still anoth- 

 er has the two middle incisors set a little apirt, while the lateral incisors seem 

 never to have developed. In one grave the skull of a very old person was found 

 lying on the pelvis of another skeleton, such a mixture of the bones of different 

 persons being not uncommon in these graves; often a single bone, the clavicle 

 or some limb bone, is found buried with the complete skeleton of another indi- 

 vidual. The bones bear mark of accident and suffering such as afflict the people 

 of the present time — fracture of the cranium, resulting in death; broken limbs, 

 repaired during life; some shinbones curved and others thickened, as if by rheu- 

 matism or some other inflammatory process. An arrow point lodged in a vertebra 

 from the middle of the back, between the shoulders, was probably the cause of 

 the death of the person. Many of the bones are reduced nearly to dust, and 

 others are so very fragile as to prevent our removing them from the graves. 

 From this we could infer a great antiquity for these remains had we not learned 

 that we cannot compute the length of time which has elapsed since the burial 

 by the condition in which the bones are found, for in the matter of time required 

 for the decay of bone, there are great individual variations. One condition alone 

 serves us for ^ general test of the antiquity of bones. The black oxide of mang- 

 anese, of which there are but minute quantities in the soil covering any buried 



