314 ABORIGINAL SITES ON TENNESSEE RIVER. 
Cox MOUND AND DwELLING-SITE, JACKSON COUNTY, ALABAMA. 
On the river-bank, in a large, cultivated field forming part of the estate of 
Mr. J. H. Cameron, who resides somewhat back on the slope of the nearby hills, 
is a mound about 13 feet in height, having a flat top, known as the Cox mound. 
Its diameters of base are 90 feet and 105 feet. The mound has upon it a frame 
structure used as a barn for Mr. Cameron’s cattle, and for this reason and owing 
to its uninviting shape, no investigation of it was attempted. 
The Cox mound stands upon a low ridge extending along the river-bank. 
On the eastern side of the mound, this ridge, which there is about 75 yards in 
width, has abundantly on the surface for a distance of about 250 yards, flint 
pebbles, broken and whole; chips of flint; fragments of musselshells; and, to a 
less extent, potsherds; broken agricultural tools of limestone; arrowheads and 
knives of flint, broken and whole, a few of the arrowheads being triangular, 
some having stems. The sherds were undecorated, bore incised, elementary 
designs, or had small checks or oblong impressions conferred with a stamp. 
All that part of the ridge on which the debris lay was carefully tested with 
the aid of a steel rod and by numerous trial-holes. Made-ground extended in 
places to a depth of nearly 5 feet, though, as a rule, soil blackened by organic 
matter was not found at more than from 2 to 2.5 feet below the surface. Under 
this was brown sand containing shells, extending to undisturbed, underlying sand. 
All this made-ground was found to be shallower beyond an area extending 
about 100 yards easterly from the mound, in which most of the burials proved 
to be, though widely-scattered ones were met throughout the whole eastern 
part of the ridge on which midden debris was apparent on the surface. 
Burials were at all depths, some nearly 5 feet down, and evidently had been 
made in graves during successive periods of the accumulation of the made-ground 
above them. 
The limits of the graves, in nearly every instance, were impossible to distin- 
guish, as they had been filled with the material removed in the process of making 
them, and the made-ground of the site had not been deposited in layers. 
Very few graves had been made in the upper dark material and continued 
into the brown sand and shells, otherwise, there would have been ample means 
to contrast the black soil with the brown sand, but seemed to have been dug 
almost exclusively either in the dark, midden material above, without going 
deeper, or in the sand and shell beneath it. 
Above some of the burials at this place, at different depths from the surface, 
a layer of clay, reddened by heat, sometimes mingled with ashes and charcoal, 
had been placed. This red layer extended beyond the limits of such graves 
where it was found, and consequently seemed to have been on top of the grave 
and on the level of the site at the time the grave was made. The depth below 
the surface at which these layers were found by us can readily be explained by 
the growth of midden deposit after the period of the making of the grave. 
