600 CERTAIN MOUNDS OF ARKANSAS AND OF MISSISSIPPI. 
of pottery which had been given its form before baking and had not been cut from 
a fragment of an earthenware vessel. 
From the trial-holes came musselshells which have been identified by Dr. H. 
A. Pilsbry as Quadrula perplicata ; О. heros; Lampsilis anodontoides. 
We are at a loss to account for our limited success in finding burials and arti- 
facts in the neighborhood of the Blum mounds. We know that domiciliary mounds, 
such as those forming this group probably were, are often without burials in their 
summit plateaus, but one would expect to find cemeteries in the surrounding level 
ground. Did such cemeteries still exist in the neighborhood of the mounds, it is 
curious we failed to find them—for it is rarely one digs to any extent among 
skeletons, wholly or in part extended, without encountering some of them. 
If cemeteries underlie the cultivated fields (and practically all the territory 
near the mounds has been under cultivation for a long time) one would look for 
numerous accounts of the finding of bones and artifacts in post-holes, in trenching, 
and in cultivation; but such accounts, as we have seen, are not forthcoming. | 
