506 CERTAIN ABORIGINAL REMAINS OF THE TOMBIGBEE RIVER, 



Fig. 2.— Knife. East Bluff- 

 port Lauding. (Full 



underground, and, besides arrowheads, only a small semilunar knife, chipped from 

 a jasper pebble, from the surface (Fig. 2). From the owner of the property we 



obtained a rude undeco rated earthenware pipe of considerable 



size, somewhat broken. 



Brasfield Mound, Brasfield Landing, Greene County, Ala. 

 This noble mound towers above cultivated fields about 

 one-half mile in a N. E. direction from Brasfield Landing, on 

 property of J. Stanhope Brasfield, Esq., of Demopolis, Ala. 

 This mound and the Grant mound near the mouth of the 

 St. John's river, Florida, are the most impressive in appear- 

 ance it has been our fortune to meet with. The mound, on 

 land high above the wash of freshets, has to-day as sharp an 

 outline, practically, as when it w T as completed. Oblong in 

 shape, its upward slope is at an angle of 30 degrees. Its 

 base has a length of 200 feet running N. W. by N. and S. E. by 

 S. and a minor diameter of 168 feet. The summit plateau is 

 135 feet by 105 feet. The mound, measured at the ends, is 

 about 19 feet in height. At the sides it is somewhat less, 

 owing to an upward slope of the surrounding territory. There is no graded way 

 or means of access to the summit save by clambering up the sides. Certain ter- 

 races in the neighborhood, we were told, had no connection with the mound, being 

 circle-ditches made in recent times to prevent the wash of rain. As domiciliary 

 mounds of this character sometimes have burials near the surface, trenches were 

 dug in the summit plateau with no other result than to show the mound to be 

 made of various materials — of sand, of clay and of sand and clay. 



It was such mounds as this, doubtless, that De Soto's men saw on their march, 

 and an extract from Pickett's " History of Alabama," 1 taken from Garcillasso de 

 la Vega, may not be out of place : 



" The houses of the Chiefs, with but few exceptions, stood upon large and 

 elevated artificial mounds. When the Indians of 1540 resolved to build a town, the 

 site of which was usually selected upon low, rich land, by the side of a beautiful 

 stream, they were accustomed, first, to turn their attention to the erection of a 

 mound from twenty to fifty feet high, round on the sides, but flat on top. The 

 top was capable of sustaining the houses of the Chief and those of his family and 

 attendants ; making a little village by itself of from ten to twenty cabins, elevated 

 high in the air. The earth to make this mound was brought to the spot. At the 

 foot of this eminence a square was marked out, around which the principal men 

 placed their houses. The inferior classes joined these with their wigwams. Some 

 of these mounds had several stairways to ascend them, made by cutting out incline- 

 planes, fifteen or twenty feet wide, flanking the sides with posts, and laying poles 

 horizontally across the earthen steps, thus forming a kind of wooden stairway. 

 1 P. 64 et seq. 



