ARCHEOLOGY. 37 



whole commnnity. The varieties of earth often intermingled in a mound 

 show that parties were working from different directions at the same 

 time, and the small quantities of one sort or other denote that work was 

 desultory or intermittent. The latter is more plainly shown in mounds 

 which were carried to a certain height and their completion left to a 

 future time. In the interim briars, bushes, even small trees grew up, 

 and were burned off when the work was resumed; the signs being quite 

 distinct in thin layers or streaks of charred matter parallel to the upper, 

 surface. Some were thus abandoned and renewed several times, a num- 

 ber of years elapsing between inception and termination. The wall of 

 Fort Ancient, also, -shows marks of such interruption. So the size of 

 any earth or stone work is no indication of a large force of workmen; 

 a smaller number, given ample time as was sometimes the case, could as 

 well accomplish the task. 



Aside from all this, the amount of labor necessary for the construc- 

 tion of the Mound Builders' remains has been greatly exaggerated. 



A regular cone twenty feet high and one hundred feet in diameter 

 at the base, will contain 1940 cubic yards. For one mound that will exceed 

 this size, a hundred will fall below it; but taking it to represent the 

 average and accepting the estimate of 10,000 as correct, the entire amount 

 of earth — and stone — in the mounds of the state will be about 19,400,000 

 cubic yards. 



A regular enclosure 1,000 feet square or 1275 feet in diameter, meas- 

 uring twenty feet in breadth at the top, forty feet at the base, and six 

 feet high, with four gateways each twenty-five feet wide, will contain 

 26,000 cubic yards. It is doubtful whether any one is so large. The 

 equivalent of four hundred such will fully equal the contents of all en- 

 closures, making in all about 30,000,000 cubic yards for the entire vol- 

 ume of aboriginal remains in Ohio. No one familiar with them will 

 dispute the liberality of these figures. 



A man can easily carry a half a bushel, or five-eighths of a cubic 

 foot of earth; 83,8.00 such loads will make the mound whose dimensions 

 are used above. If one hundred persons engage in the work, each will 

 have to carry eight hundred and thirty-eight loads; in a day of ten hours, 

 twenty such loads would not be an onerous task. Thus the mound could 

 be finished in forty-two days. With the same force, working in the same 

 way, the illustrative embankment could be completed in five hundred 

 and forty-six days; but a village that would require such a work could 

 furnish a much larger number of laborers. i 



Or, on the estimate of 30,000,000 cubic yards, one thousand men, 

 each working one hundred days in the year and carrying three wagon- 

 loads of earth or stone in a day, could construct all the works in Ohio, 

 within a century. 



