222 CERTAIN ABORIGINAL REMAINS, BLACK WARRIOR RIVER. 
Several effigies of heads of birds were met with, including the head of an owl, 
ornaments which had been broken from earthenware vessels. 
Many fragments of excellent black ware were scattered throughout the mound, 
especially in the northeastern part, where most of the burials were. These frag- 
ments presumably belonged to-vessels that had been placed with burials but which 
later were broken in the digging and redigging of that part of the mound in which 
they occurred. One sherd of excellent ware and with artistic decoration is shown 
in Fig. 142. 
A part of a cooking vessel, with a series of small loop-handles below the rim, 
lay in the mound. 
Fie. 142.—Sherd. Ridge north of Mound R. (Full size.) 
There were found also pottery discs made from parts of vessels; two stopper- 
shaped objects of earthenware, one somewhat broken; part of what seems to have 
been a toy ladle of pottery; and part of a disc of pottery not made from a frag- 
ment of vessel but directly as an ornament, as 18 shown by the surface which is 
polished although there is a gradation in thickness between the central part and the 
margin. Around the margin are notches, and incised decoration is on one side of 
the specimen. There are two holes for suspension. 
Two piercing implements of bone, several tines of deer-horn, and various 
mussel-shells, one very large (Lampsilis purpuratus), were in the midden debris. 
In a mound where there had been so much disturbance, one burial often dis- 
plaeing another, an exact record of the number of burials and their form is impos- 
sible to give. In cases where a burial obviously had been made in a certain way, 
but had undergone partial disturbance, it has been classed by us under its original 
form. We have designated as aboriginal disturbances such bones as were too much 
scattered to afford evidence of their original positions. Burials lay from just below 
the surface to a depth, in one instance, of 4 feet. "There were in the mound : 
