1879.] on (Putnam. 
General Meeting. December 3, 1879. 
The President, Mr. T. T. Bouvé, in the chair. Twenty- 
six persons present. 
Mr. J. W. Fewkes showed portions of an Indian skeleton 
recently exhumed in Newton, on the banks of the Charles 
River. With the skeleton was found a box-turtle shell, evi- 
dently buried with it. Various circumstances indicated a 
considerable antiquity. 
Mr. F. W. Putnam said that the bones shown by Mr. 
‘Fewkes were very interesting. 
He gave several measurements of the skull and long bones, which 
had just been taken by Mr. Lucien Carr, assistant curator of the Pea- 
body Museum of Ethnology. ‘The skull was very long and narrow, and 
from its slight structure and small development of the ridges for 
muscular attachment was probably that of a woman. The condition 
of the teeth and the thin under jaw indicated a person far 
advanced in life. The tibiz were remarkably flattened, having an 
index of 0.52 and 0.53; the index of the well known tibiae from the 
River Rough Mound — the flattest yet known from North:America— 
being 0.48, while thirty flat tibie from mounds in Kentucky, 
measured by Wyman, had an average index of 0.60. 
Mr. Carr’s measurements are: Length of skull, 184 mm.; breadth, 
128 mm.; index of breadth, 695. Height of person, 5 ft. 6 in. esti- 
mated from the lee bones. 
Mr. Putnam hoped that Dr. Fewkes would continue the exploration 
of the burial place he had described, as the crania of New England 
Indians were very rare in collections and they were of great import- 
ance. ‘The finding of the shell of the box-turtle with the human 
skeleton was of interest, as he had found several such turtle-shells in 
the graves of the southern moundbuilders. The condition of the 
bones, he stated, did not always give an indication of the time which 
had passed since the burial of the body, as difference of soil, of dryness, 
or of moisture, and probably a difference in the structure of the 
bones themselves, caused a great variation in the decay of skeletons. 
